I think it would be fine if they gave a little guidance on the disc itself. Maybe little notes above the prompt that tell you what you should do next in the installation process, or even just a notice that says "see /usr/doc/INSTALL for instructions". The first time I attempted to install Arch after the installer was dropped, I had no idea what to do and had to find another computer to bring the wiki up. Some people might not have a spare computer to bring the instructions up, and they might not have a printer either.

I've been living my life mostly using pacman with archlinux and in the last year I experienced the ubuntu/debian way for the first time... Trying to get around dozen of apt commands and other tools is truly painfull.

But it's probably just me that got used to a simple and easy life with pacman... There was a time that I even had to create an ubuntu package, well, don't get me started, I cried a little and lost around 3 days.

Last time I installed arch was before they removed the menu driven installer and it sure had some problems and bugs, so even if I have not tried it yet, I think I prefer this way of installing. It's cleaner, simpler, so better.

apt vs. pacman: Could you elaborate a little? What's your main reasoning for this?

I have tried Arch on three machines (old netbook, laptop, desktop) and all went fine during installing (all LUKS cryptorooted). What made me mad was when some stuff broke on two of them due to infrequent updates this spring (didnt use both netbook+desktop for a longer time). Alas, I can't remember details any more.

Made me switch back (to debian) I almost never use aptitude and dpkg only for low level stuff (e.g, when there are errors). Apt alone is in almost all cases sufficient.