Sure, Arch is very much a distro that you only will install what you want and none of the extras until you find a need. There’s none of the extra bloat you get in most distros. And if you want to install something that isn’t part of a distro package, you can install it via the Arch Users Repository (AUR) which has a combination of both binaries and source packages that will compile at install.
And most importantly all of that is easy to maintain, including the AUR using either pacman (the package manager) or yay (a wrapper for pacman that can update not only distro packages but anything in AUR). The worst part about installing projects manually is usually you have to do all the work of keeping it up to date, with but yay, it’s just “yay”, say yes a few times, and you’re generally done for everything.
Sure, Arch is very much a distro that you only will install what you want and none of the extras until you find a need. There’s none of the extra bloat you get in most distros. And if you want to install something that isn’t part of a distro package, you can install it via the Arch Users Repository (AUR) which has a combination of both binaries and source packages that will compile at install.
And most importantly all of that is easy to maintain, including the AUR using either pacman (the package manager) or yay (a wrapper for pacman that can update not only distro packages but anything in AUR). The worst part about installing projects manually is usually you have to do all the work of keeping it up to date, with but yay, it’s just “yay”, say yes a few times, and you’re generally done for everything.