I am new to Arch Linux, but each day I love it more and more.

Today I had to compile conky, because I was needing a special option that was not set by default, in any other distribution, I would have to download the .tar.gz (tarbal) file and go through the normal process of

./configure
make
make install

And I am not saying that is not possible, or too difficult, but if you do that on Debian, Ubuntu or any other distro (not on Gentoo, or maybe slackware) the package manager will then loose control over the installed package, to update it when updates become available.
Not with Arch Linux, thanks to ABS

Installing abs

sudo pacman -S abs base-devel

Create the tree

sudo abs

Compile and install a package

I will use htop as the example here:

mkdir -p $HOME/abs

cp -r /var/abs/extra/htop $HOME/abs

cd /$HOME/abs/htop

makepkg -s

sudo pacman -U htop-xxx.pkg.tar.gz

That is all, now pacman will take care of future updates of the package.

Isn't Arch Linux lovevly?