> Getting basic WiFi connected with DHCP on vanilla Arch requires enabling multiple services and conf file edits - you rage against the machine thinking why is it so hard
It's not trivial, but it's not difficult either. I have been using iwd. It involves installing one package, editing one file, and enabling two services. There are no dependencies beyond the base package, partially because a DHCP client is built into iwd. It may be possible to get away with enabling only one service, but I haven't figured out how to get the glibc resolver working. Incidentally, this TUI appears to be a replacement connection manager for iwd's `iwctl` command.
Of course, installing a desktop environment may result in NetworkManager being installed and NetworkManager will install it's preferred network stack. That said: I don't recall Arch enabling NetworkManager by default, though it is definitely something people would enable when installing a desktop environment (leading to the dueling network managers situation).
(A similar lesson learned: systemd-boot is much easier to setup than traditional boot managers and it is installed on Arch by default. Like iwd, it is meant for common straight forward setups.)
What confuses me about the part of the article you quote is that wifi doesn't really stick out as one of the harder parts of installing Arch; having fine-grained control over how the system is set up and therefore configuring everything by hand is kind of the point! At least to me, it's more straightforward than manually partitioning/formatting the hard drive and manually populating /etc/fstap, especially when you want to involve things like LUKS and LVM. My standard practice if I need wifi is to start with `wpa_supplicant` and `dhcpcd`, and then I can swap to NetworkManager later when I get around to setting up the GUI (which will usually be "post install", after I've rebooted into the new installation). Setting them up sounds similar to iwd (editing one file and enabling two services), which is pretty run-of-the-mill for an Arch installation.
> Of course, installing a desktop environment may result in NetworkManager being installed and NetworkManager will install it's preferred network stack. That said: I don't recall Arch enabling NetworkManager by default, though it is definitely something people would enable when installing a desktop environment (leading to the dueling network managers situation).
It definitely doesn't enable it by default; I'm not really even sure what "default" would mean in this context because Arch doesn't really have an "installer" in the traditional sense. An Arch installation typically will comprise of partioning/formatting the hard drive, mounting the partitions, running `pacstrap` to install things directly to the mounted root rather than to the currently running system, and then chrooting in to manually configure anything else that's needed. I guess some people might consider what you get from the `base` set of packages to be "default", but IIRC that alone wouldn't come with _anything_ to configure wifi, let alone NetworkManager.
> What confuses me about the part of the article you quote is that wifi doesn't really stick out as one of the harder parts of installing Arch; having fine-grained control over how the system is set up and therefore configuring everything by hand is kind of the point!
Agreed. On the other hand, what you decide to spend your time tuning will bias what you think of as simple or complex. I tend to lean towards the "fewest moving parts" along with "tried and true" solutions, so partitioning is straightforward. It sounds like you have other needs, so partitioning is more complex.
> It definitely doesn't enable it by default; I'm not really even sure what "default" would mean in this context because Arch doesn't really have an "installer" in the traditional sense.
By default I mean any actions taken by hooks/scripts during package installation, or the configuration files installed with the package. Arch may take a light touch, but some decisions are made either by the package maintainers or the original software developers.
It's not trivial, but it's not difficult either. I have been using iwd. It involves installing one package, editing one file, and enabling two services. There are no dependencies beyond the base package, partially because a DHCP client is built into iwd. It may be possible to get away with enabling only one service, but I haven't figured out how to get the glibc resolver working. Incidentally, this TUI appears to be a replacement connection manager for iwd's `iwctl` command.
Of course, installing a desktop environment may result in NetworkManager being installed and NetworkManager will install it's preferred network stack. That said: I don't recall Arch enabling NetworkManager by default, though it is definitely something people would enable when installing a desktop environment (leading to the dueling network managers situation).
(A similar lesson learned: systemd-boot is much easier to setup than traditional boot managers and it is installed on Arch by default. Like iwd, it is meant for common straight forward setups.)