Ubuntu's the only major distribution (that I know of) that has an integrated and supported process for installing the closed video drivers you'll need to run their games on ati/nvidia.
But... # pacman -S nvidia nvidia-utils
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/NVIDIA
Is all I did for the work install, took longer to finish the setup but thats more due to me having 2 monitors than anything else, one is mad simple. Can't speak to the ati stuff. I know SuSe is about as simple as well.
Yes. Yes it is.
I'd say Arch is pretty simple, just not easy [0]. Easy would be inserting the install cd, walking away, coming back and being able to hit the internet. Which is fine, if that's all you want to do. Arch installation isn't easy, it's simple, and more importantly it works. When I install windows from scratch you know what it comes with? Nothing. No drivers, no programs, nothing. Not even an ethernet driver for me to get the other drivers. Arch comes with all of it out of the box, you just need to go through the tutorial so you can choose which things in the box you actually want.
Arch is simple in that if I go to any scary looking file in /etc and open it up I won't be completely baffled by what's in it. I can randomly shut down any service running on my machine and I know my box will keep chugging and I can recover from it. There's no weird services that I don't know what they do, no scripts that run on startup that I can't understand let alone find. There aren't inter-dependencies that I don't know about. When I run ps aux I can account for every single thing running.
And even then, the package management is simple AND easy. I have never had a problem installing something with pacman, not once. There's this oft-repeated line about upgrades breaking systems, but I've never seen it. If an upgrade fails I look at the front page of archlinux.org and see that some manual commands are needed, copy-paste them and voila things work. I've used arch on three computers now, two laptops and a very old desktop, and have never had any problems. I know there's going to be some horror stories, but I can counter any of them with a quick search for the same in windows. Problems upgrading happen, but they're not common, and not something that's inherent to Arch like I've seen people suggest.
[ ] Desktop
[ ] Server
[ ] Embedded
[ ] Custom
This ultimately comes down to a user interface issue, but it's different than the kind of user interface often associated with the HN crowd. It's more like an API user interface, be that a web or programming library API. A crucial feature of good APIs is 'graceful degradation' in terms of easiness/control. Take a look at the libcURL library[1]. cURL has 3 levels of access: "easy," "share," and "multi." If you don't care about a lot of features and just want to download a webpage, the easy interface will get you what you want in a few lines of code. If you have something more complicated, you can go all the way down to the multi interface to access many of the raw functions of the API.
They key takeaway is giving the user control of her complexity level. If I'm a sysadmin compiling an image meant to be deployed on thousands of servers, then something like Arch would be pretty great -- I can fine-tune things how I want. If I'm just a random developer, then I would like to stick to 'sane defaults,' with the option to revisit those defaults later if needed.
I really don't care what cron I have, don't force me to pick one against my will.
I dunno what I'm doing that's so magical; I just install the dang thing.
But having installed Linux back in 1997 and dealing with X11Rwhatever it was back then and minicom and all that jazz, kinda makes my view of hard a bit off of what most people view as hard.
One nice thing about Arch though is the ArchWiki: it has copious amounts of documentation on software that is usually applicable to other distros. A good example is https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Awesome