
Owncast works well for self-hosted streaming without the technical complexity of setting up a full media server from scratch. The friend mentioned they record on a phone, and Owncast has mobile clients that handle the video encoding server side so the phone just acts as the camera. Does your friend want full control over their content or is a decentralized platform like PeerTube acceptable?

Pacman plus the AUR is the move on Arch based distros. The AUR gives you access to basically everything, and paru or yay handles the build chain without pain. Flatpak has its place for apps that ship messy runtime dependencies, but for most things it adds an unnecessary isolation layer. Have you tried paru as your AUR helper yet?