Sorry, I can't agree about scrapping "Beginners guide".

Ubuntu gave me simple install. Once I've started tinkering it become broken. Following Installation guide and Beginners guide I got stable system with internet connection without Gnome toolbar widget. I could build on top of it.

These days I stick with Arch because of fresh packages, rolling release, makepkg and AUR. Just looking at https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Network_interface is enough to stick with wifi-menu / wpa_supplicant.