Your replies provided a partial solution to my problem, with the suggestion that .deb and rpm packages can be converted to TC extensions. This is very useful and goes a long to way in alleviating the problem. However, if the conversion process via the script is not always guaranteed to succeed (as bmarkus pointed out), then the problem still remains, at least for non-advanced users like me. My expertise being rather limited, I would not be able to manually convert the alien packages to TC, and I am afraid I may not even be able compile from the sources safely.
If indeed the TC team does not undertake the task of providing a minimum amount (which has not been reached yet, IMHO) ready-to-use extensions guaranteed to work well with TC, then I am afraid that many users will find it hard to stick with TC, and it would be a pity, because TC is excellent.
Please, do not take my remarks as a criticism, but as a request and an encouragement.
I wish the developers team could dedicate some more time to porting applications, for the benefit of users like me who are unable to do the porting themselves.