I am sort of getting used to pacman with msys2. Do Arch or Manjaro package registries (are they the same thing?) have good availability in general?
What I mean is, in Arch or Manjaro, how often are there already packages available for things that people normally want to do, versus needing to compile something manually or work around broken dependencies?
Can't speak for Manjaro, but basically every software I use has an Arch package.
This extends to some closed source projects other distros don't include on principle, like Steam [1].
Additionally, the AUR is basically a wrapper around "manually compiling" where users can submit scripts to do it for you. If you install a helper like `yay`, it's as seamless as installing from the official repo and extends coverage to things like the OpenTTD modpack I play [2] and its latest git commit [3]. That said, the AUR is still ultimately running user provided scripts so do make sure to take the offer to read the install script beforehand, most are maybe 5-10 lines.
I'm using Arch for 2 years (it's my first distro) and I've had only a handful of problems. Usually it's not packaging (deps etc) but rather corner cases and fresh bugs. For example recently kernel had a big that froze display on Intel Graphics. It's good to have a backup drive with minimal system for debugging.
What I mean is, in Arch or Manjaro, how often are there already packages available for things that people normally want to do, versus needing to compile something manually or work around broken dependencies?