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.
The only potential downside is that software is not handled by your package manager, so uninstalling or upgrading can be pain. But there are ways around it like source based package managers or manually building binary packages and then installing them.