configure && make;
In fact, I remember that one thing which kept me on Debian for a long time was that it had so many available packages. Back then Debian was even slower than today and many of those packages were a little old, but it didn't really matter to someone who was just discovering things.
It's easy to forget about them, but package maintainers are incredibly important in today's Linux (and *nix-inspired in general) world. There's a lot of hard work behind the fact that you can just apt-get whatever new program you found out about.
As an example, program X might need to compute a statistic like the skewness of a distribution. A stats package might implement the skewness calculation, so the author of X adds the dependency and calls the right function.
However, building the stats package might require a Fortran compiler and some matrix libraries, since the stats package does much more than compute skewness.
Another approach would be for the author of X to incorporate the few tens of lines needed for the skewness as part of X. This is of course more work for the author X, so I can well understand the desire to simply declare it as a dependency.