I am quite comfortable finding my way around ArchLinux, and recently decided to give Gentoo a try. I didn’t expect it to be that much harder but all the cflags, emerge, conflicts and updates feels like black magic. I guess that if you know your way around Gentoo, reverse-engineering a deb file is not a real challenge. However I’m assuming that most Linux users would hope for a less involved solution.
Arch User Repository. If you’re using Arch, you get the basic stuff from the official repositories. But for most programs there’s the AUR. They’re often less polished, some of it may be proprietary. There are package managers dedicated for it, that also know to handle the official repositories.
Looks better, but every time I tried it it didn’t work for me so much. I noticed that I associate an app with its color, and that it’s easier for me to look for something orange when I’m looking for Firefox than just the shape of the logo. This is one of the reasons why I hate Google Icon designs which basically use the same colors in their designs. Might look more aesthetical, but for me at least it is less practical.
No. It should be minimalistic by default. If you want to add a tail just grab one from the AUR.