Are there any risks or disadvantages to building software from source, compared to installing a package? Can it mess with my system in any way?
I usually avoid it because I’ve found it to be a faff and often doesn’t work anyway but in a couple of cases it has been necessary.
There are flags to disable things, like pulseaudio or whatever, so its not even included in the binary. Which means its 100% safe against vulnerabilities in that piece of code since its not inside the binary at all.