It should also be in pacman cache on the local machine at /var/cache/pacman/pkg/

So all the interesting opera features are still missing, is there any plan to put them back ?

I'm talking about the sidebar, the gestures, the middle click paste'n'go, tab stacking, etc.

So it took 2 years and 11 versions for the opera to reach linux and as I feared it doesn't even start to have the features that defined opera and were the reasons I've chosen opera in the first place.

The new opera is not much more than a skin for chromium that I dislike much.

Opera is of no use to me without the sidebar, gestures, tab stacking, middle click paste'n' go in the background of any page and much more. I'm afraid these are not coming back any time soon if ever, I guess for now I'm stuck with the real opera and have to get started in firefox extensions to try to replicate in firefox what was in opera.

Last update of opera on (arch)Linux => mail client gone.
It seems now Opera mail is windows only. Effectively making opera a plain webkit browser, no mail, no gestures, what (to me) made opera opera is now gone, replaced by oyaw, Opera yet another webkitbrowser
Is there any foreseable fix apart from finding an old package ? - which is not really a viable solution.

I use arch too, the solution is to downgrade opera and make it permanently stay at the version where opera was opera and just another google based browser.

go to the Arch Rollback Machine and get the package there: http://seblu.net/a/arm/packages/o/opera/opera-12.16.1860-2-x86_64.pkg.tar.xz

install it with pacman -U opera-12.16.1860-2-x86_64.pkg.tar.xz

then edit /etc/pacman.conf to add IgnorePkg = opera

Now you can use the real opera again until it slowly rots to the point it's obsolete and has to be replaced. It's sad but I think we have to accept that the opera we enjoyed so much is now dead and will not be back and has been replaced by more or less a skin for google chrome. Well as they say hope for the best and prepare for the worst.