• @Hawk
    link
    13 hours ago

    With Arch pacman -Syu will do it for you. Generally you are encouraged to stick with the version in the repositories.

    You can install things from source by downloading the source code, building it (eg. gcc code.c or cargo build) and then copying the binary somewhere.

    Typically if you were going to install things from Source, you would write a pkgbuild for it and that would integrate it with pacman so you have a centralised manager of everything that you have installed to simplify updates and removal and conflicts etc.

    Doing this for small packages is pretty trivial and sometimes necessary. For a large package like KDE plasma It is a very large undertaking and you would never do it in practise.

    The maintainers package the desktop environment with a pkgbuild, test it, And then upload it so that you can use it.

    Also note that when the arch maintainers do package that software they compile it into a binary so you just have to download it. You don’t also have to build it.