Personally I'd recommend even trivial projects to use Cabal. If it's a "project" and not just a 15 minute job, cabal init. It takes 2~ minutes to edit the resulting Cabal file with the libs you need. cabal-dev would also be very helpful to newbies. The amount of time I wasted as a newbie reinstalling packages because I had conflicts with existing installed packages... cabal-dev solves this and lets you get back to hacking.