Alas, but in my long experience that's seldom the case.
Invariably you end up having to add GPG keys for a bunch of weird and wonderful 3rd party package sites, then fight with your package manager to get it to use them, spend hours scouring the web for source code tarballs, spend an age fiddling with compiler flags to get things to build, and... ach! Eventually you're bound to wish you'd never started in the first place!
What kind of niche product are you using? I wouldn't add some 'weird' 3rd party package sites but only if those are official repositories from the upstream. You do not compile stuff unless you're on something like OpenBSD and the binary doesn't exist. That is a very weird experience if you're using popular apps.
I have this kind of problem regularly, especially if I want to run versions of software newer than 3 years old.
Also, compiling software is quite normal on Linux. Often it's just `make && sudo make install`, and everything works - but sometimes you've got to go on a goose chase to fulfill dependencies, tinker with compiler flags etc.
Invariably you end up having to add GPG keys for a bunch of weird and wonderful 3rd party package sites, then fight with your package manager to get it to use them, spend hours scouring the web for source code tarballs, spend an age fiddling with compiler flags to get things to build, and... ach! Eventually you're bound to wish you'd never started in the first place!