I also never had problems with that. Almost all players come with the needed codecs. If you need more, it’s a matter of looking at the optional dependencies or taking a look at the official wiki to know from which official repo to install the needed codec. But that’s only for uncommon codecs.
The regular user should never have to deal with this with pretty much any distro I know of. Where did you have problems?
I really hope they resolved the performance issues LO has. I remember in 2009, I used LO on a really old Laptop in school. I had a very old one from ~2001. 1GHz single core CPU. 256MB RAM. It wasn’t fast, but it actually was usable.
Sometimes, I now have troubles using LO with a machine that is more than 10 times as capable. I don’t know why, but the performance is really really bad in LO. I could definitely not use current LO on that old Laptop.
I also never had problems with that. Almost all players come with the needed codecs. If you need more, it’s a matter of looking at the optional dependencies or taking a look at the official wiki to know from which official repo to install the needed codec. But that’s only for uncommon codecs.
The regular user should never have to deal with this with pretty much any distro I know of. Where did you have problems?