On OSX there is the fantastic http://postgresapp.com/ . It installs into /Applications so it is easy to remove, and comes with a start/stop GUI and taskbar icon. Great for local development.

But installing and configuring Postgres "properly" on a server is still something of a challenge. Do I need to modify random_page_cost on a SSD or not? What are good memory limits on modern big servers? What exactly needs to go into pg_hba.conf?

None of these seem too difficult after reading a few tutorials and wikis, but it would be nice if the server set itself up with reasonable defaults based on the machine its running on.

Getting started with PostgreSQL on Linux is actually trivial. What is annoying though that there are lots of guides which talk about editing pg_hba.conf which is not necessary for the simplest setup. The default pg_hba.conf is good in most distros.

We must have different definitions of trivial compared to what I had to go through every time - it's a mess of an install process that takes tweaking config files just to have it even listen to external requests.