Comment by grumbel

Autotools helps you nothing when it comes to dependencies. It will just fail, maybe with a useful error message, maybe not. INSTALL file might give you vague hints on what you might need, often imprecise, outdated or incorrect. It's all just manual human work from there. That's a huge problem for Free Software as it ensures that nobody bothers to build their own software, largely removing the one big benefit Free Software should actually have.

GuixSD is working on fixing that, but that's a relatively recent development and at the moment at least it's missing anything equivalent to Nix flakes, forcing you to essentially fork the whole OS when you want to change anything and making you heavily depend on a central authority again.

We are still years away from a point where you can just build Free Software yourself across all the platforms that are supported by it. Even Guix and Nix will bail out the moment you try to target Windows or Android, if they support it at all (Nix supports Windows a little via cross-compiling, but few packages will build successfully).