I don't think he was saying that Emacs is hard to install on Ubuntu. (It's not.) OP said earlier in the post that he switched to Arch because Ubuntu doesn't package a version of Emacs new enough to satisfy the requirements on the latest version of Spacemacs, which wants Emacs 24.4, which in turn is only available from the repo if you're running Ubuntu 16.x. Building Emacs 24.4 from source seems to me like it would be easier than switching distros, but apparently OP feels differently, and more power to him.
The comparison between Arch and Ubuntu appeared rather to be on the basis of FSF blessedness:
> (the FSF probably wouldn’t like that I’m using Arch Linux, but it’s certainly better than Ubuntu)
> wants Emacs 24.4, which in turn is only available from the repo if you're running Ubuntu 16.x.
This is not an emacs problem, it is much bigger than that.
Ubuntu, and Debian (unless you are on unstable) ship with ancient versions of many things. This shows how inefficient the package maintainer system is. Lets see if snappy (or some competing technology) manages to fix that.
So you get my point, then? Or maybe not. (To be more clear, my personal experience with emacs is irrelevant. I was referring to the author's experience in my original comment.)
I'm loving spacemacs, but I can already see that I will do exactly this eventually. Evil is fantastic (because vim is fantastic) but I've been a power-user for long enough to have a strong opinion over exactly what I want.
I've not used spacemacs, but I use emacs on Windows. What issues have you faced, in particular? I typically just download the latest build from the project itself, uncompress it, and run "runemacs.exe".
The hardest part is figuring out where emacs thinks your home directory is (for me it's c:\users\<username>\appdata\roaming) to place your config files in (well, I have a config file there that loads my actual config file in a more sane location).
The biggest issue was building emacs. I couldn't find a clear binary distribution that didn't set-off all my malware radar(hello sourceforge!) so getting mingw32 to play nice and build took much more effort than it should have.
MinGW/GitBash include Vim by default so there it makes the setup process a no-brainer.
This is where I've gone for my binaries, and I've never had an issue (for windows, on OS X and Linux I just use the appropriate package manager I use for everything else).
