It’s more of I don’t want to spend hours installing essentials rather than a real issue.
Opensuse, stock debian, fedora, clear linux.
I suffered through this enough number of times till I learned to install browsers this way.
By the way the reason you did not notice any issue in codecs is that ubuntu and arch come with codecs.
I am not calling for anything.
I am just posting a tip for linux users.
I hope it will make the people who want to use linux daily, do not think of the codecs as reason to not switch.