[memefrog]

Establishing a full DE on Arch is as simple as 'pacman -S plasma kde-applications sddm' followed by 'systemctl enable sddm.service'.

Compiling everything manually would take a long time. You would need to work out all the dependencies, make everything, install everything, create all the configuration files... You'd then need to do this again every time a package is updated. You'd hope that every dependency had an RSS feed you could follow. For those that didn't you'd need to regularly check for updates. Arch requires two commands...