You pretty much just use the package manager for your distribution. The big distributions have pretty much every program you're going to need. I barely ever ins

You pretty much just use the package manager for your distribution. The big distributions have pretty much every program you're going to need. I barely ever install something manually. And for the things you do install manually, it's almost always one of two methods. If the software creator is kind enough to provide a package for your distribution, you download and double-click it. Otherwise, it's a .tgz file that you extract and (almost always) do: ./configure && make && make install