there’s different ways to install things because they each have their use cases in which they’re better than others (or used to have use cases)

• binary package managers (e.g. apt): fast and lightweight because it only downloads/installs the necessary binaries

• flatpak: can be installed on any distro, but takes up more storage space because they’re installed in a sandbox and all the dependencies are also installed with it, for every application

• snap: same thing as flatpak but a bit worse, but some applications are only packaged for snap because canonical paid a lot of big companies to package for snap (rhey didn’t incentivise against flatpak, they just didn’t fund flatpak)

• appimage: the ‘windows exe’ kinda thing and has all the dependencies bundled so distro agnostic, but you have to manage the appimage files yourself unless you get a manager for it and you can’t update them centrally like you can do with other stuff

• source code repos (e.g. aur): have to compile every new version yourself on your machine, so is slow to update, but often offers things not in the binary package manager

• .sh files for installation: idk why these are used, they’re just annoying. a lot of proprietary software from corpos use them (probably so they can verify dependencies themselves and not trust the system)

• binariy files (e.g. .deb): same thing as with appimage except they’re not distro agnostic

• tar.gz: is just a compressed file format like zip

including examples for everything in the docs is the best way to explain imo