Aur and pacman are 90% of why I use arch.
Also fyi to OP: never install software system-wide without your package manager. No sudo make install
, no curl .. | sudo bash
or whatever the readme calls for. Not because it’s unsafe, but because eventually you’re likely to end up with a broken system, and then you’ll blame your distro for it, or just Linux in general.
My desktop install is about a decade old now, and never broke because I only ever use the package manager.
Of course in your home folder anything goes.
Well personally if a package is not on aur I first check if there’s an appimage available, or if there’s a flatpak. If neither exist, I generally make a package for myself.
It sounds intimidating, but for most software the package description is just gonna be a single file of maybe 10-15 lines. It’s a useful skill to learn and there’s lots of tutorials explaining how to get into it, as well as the arch wiki serving as documentation. Not to mention, every aur or arch package can be looked at as an example, just click the “view PKGBUILD” link on the side on the package view. You can even simply download an existing package with git clone and just change some bits.
Alternatively you can just make it locally and use it like that, i.e. just run make without install.