There are packages for ROS in the aur. And there are wrappers for the commands needed to install packages from AUR. To install ros on my system I just need to execute pacaur -S ros-noetic-desktop-full In this case it will indeed compile the package with cmake. But there are also many binary packages on the aur. The user experience is not like Gentoo. I have never had problems finding a package with Arch.

I have returned to Linux after a few years on macOS, and tried Fedora 32: it's interesting, but I did not like:

- The hassle you have to do to install "non-free" software.

- It's basically RHEL unstable: plenty of opinionated, bleeding-edge software choices that are either unsupported [1] or very much undocumented, unless you can find some help on the actual RHEL guides.

- COPR (user packages) is worse than Ubuntu's PPA, both of which are much worse than Arch Linux's AUR.

1: Running Docker on Fedora 32 is non trivial because of how firewalld is configured and because Fedora decided to go all in on nftables. Sure, it's the future, but Docker hasn't got the memo yet. Nor the memo about cgroups2.