AFAIK, most distros will also have a package manager/software center where you install flatpaks (or snaps if you are on ubuntu). Think of flatpaks akin to mobile apps where everything needed is all together in one package. Not all apps will be flatpaked though, and VPNs tend to be nearly always direct binaries due to needing some higher level permissions than what flatpaks will allow.

Essentially, what im saying is no, not all apps need to be manually installed, but some might need to for one reason or another. And sometimes, knowing a little about how some of these apps are installed might actually help you understand linux a little more (it has in my case)

I agree with echo. A tv with android OS is far better than webOS or Tizen. I have samsung tvs and LG and loading jellyfin onto them is difficult…involving developer mode and toolkits to self compile and manually update. Atleast android OS has access to the same play store as chrome casts.

Fortunately, if you are looking to spend money on samsung or LG, Sonys run androidOS/google tv in just about all their tvs these days, price is near enough the same and you arent fiddling about just to install an app.

I installed Bazzite last night, coming from nobara with a random resource pinning issue that locked up the OS. So far so good though. Still trying to figure out how to ger games to run on linux though, so far i have only gotten Baldurs Gate 3 to run, but theoretically, most of my game library should work