When you install any new distro, most of the time it does not come with the video and audio codecs to play videos online and offline.
The best way in my opinion to use codecs without spending hours installing is:
Install needed apps as flatpak.
The most common apps that need codecs is browsers and video players like vlc and mpv.
Just install them(Make sure you enable flathub repo) as flatpak (installed by default in most distros) and you will not need to spend time installing codecs from untrusted third party repos ever again.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word “Linux” in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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Fedora as this issue where you need to have rpm fusion to install “non-free” drivers. Other than that you are right all beginner friendly distros have them installed by default (Ubuntu, mint, and friends)