To really emphasize this (also and especially applies to Arch Linux):
- The wiki is really awesome. I even know Debian and Ubuntu users who consult the Arch Wiki when they have problems. Whenever I encounter a problem the Arch Wiki or at the very least the Arch forums have the solution that I am looking for.
- The AUR also has a lot of legacy packages, which are useful when you depend on older libraries (e.g. you use Python3.7, but need Python3.6). This was a real pain when I tried out MacOS with homebrew.
However, one thing to nitpick about: Users need to be very careful when installing language-specific packages. For instance, pip and pacman can interfere with each other and may need manual intervention when the same package is installed with both manager. (In the end I solved this by simply installing all Python packages locally and I am very thankful that all Julia packages are only locally installed by default).
Unfortunately, I have started to run into some problems with bleeding edgeness and for now there are some things that I run with conda to avoid the next update-apocalypse.
But maybe NixOS (or only nix)is something that can fix this for me.
To get back to the original question: I use Arch Linux (which I find by far to be easier to install than Gentoo btw.) and XMonad (not that it matters ;)) and compiling Julia works for me without any problem.