From the Gentoo user and Debian/RedHat server admin perspective the whole AUR mess with its 20 package managers just for that and its different way to install stuff compared to the main distro packages has always made me stop Arch-based distros whenever I gave them a try. Why can’t they do what Gentoo and Debian and RedHat distros do and have one unified packaging system for all packages?
On the other binary distros I don’t have to compile third party packages myself though. And on Gentoo I use ebuilds for everything and they are super-easy to write, especially if you have a similar package as a starting point.
From the Gentoo user and Debian/RedHat server admin perspective the whole AUR mess with its 20 package managers just for that and its different way to install stuff compared to the main distro packages has always made me stop Arch-based distros whenever I gave them a try. Why can’t they do what Gentoo and Debian and RedHat distros do and have one unified packaging system for all packages?
You can use pacman and makepkg for everything if you want. Alternative tools are for convenience.
On the other binary distros I don’t have to compile third party packages myself though. And on Gentoo I use ebuilds for everything and they are super-easy to write, especially if you have a similar package as a starting point.