Windows applications tend to act as large, monolithic applications that work within themselves. The world of Linux operates a bit differently from Windows or Mac OS. Though each Linux distribution has its pros and cons, they all have one thing in common: Linux package manager. I've experimented with a lot of Linux distributions since the late 90s from enterprise-level REHL and Ubuntu distros to more niche distributions like Pop OS and Elementary OS - and even the versions of Linux, like Arch and Gentoo, that make Linux newcomers cringe. I didn't understand that Linux distributions have something called a package manager. I followed a few guides available back then, learned how to use the Make command, configured GCC for my computer, and installed a few applications, but I routinely ran into dependency issues that drove me insane. I understood that in the world of Linux a lot of applications were compiled from source code and installed from scratch. Gnome and KDE didn't have good graphical interfaces that offered the kind of user experience that offered subtle hints on how to perform basic operating system management like software installation. At the time, the Linux desktop wasn't nearly as refined as it is today.

The very first Linux distribution I used was Fedora back in the late 1990s.

How to install linux packages