I just spent some time helping a former colleague work out some basic setup issues after he got stuck trying to follow the Getting Started section of the manual [1] and almost gave up. For what it's worth, he's very technical, but does not deal with Postgres setup regularly.
The problems he ran into are fairly trivial, but I can see how he was frustrated: the article makes very few assumptions about your environment (which is great), but as a result is really vague and full of evasive suggestions to "contact your administrator" if something is not working (not great).
All I had to do (on Ubunutu) was run `sudo -u postgres createuser -s $(whoami)`, and then omit the hostname (connecting to postgres:///maciek) to use socket connections so I could take advantage of peer authentication to avoid having to specify my password everywhere. The same thing worked for him (on Debian, I believe).
Obviously this is not a solution for everyone, but I think packaging is more common and more standardized these days, and administrators who may have set up Postgres for you and can help you get started are less common.
I'm not sure how to address his frustrations, and balance that with avoiding too many assumptions about users' environments, but it seems many successful tools these days have explicit, platform-specific sections of their setup to ensure that users can get started quickly and painlessly. Could the Getting Started guide be improved here? Thoughts?
Thanks,
Maciek