If you're trying out Linux—or completely switching over to it—after getting used to Windows or macOS, you're going to have to familiarize yourself with how software gets installed on this open ...

It used to be that open source software was released only as source code and had to be compiled wherever it was needed. Obviously, that’s changed. Today, some will even tell you that compiling ...

Again, you can compile software directly from source code—download the source code which comes in a tarball, unzip it and then compile it.

LD_LIBRARY_PATH on Linux and DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH on OSX do the same thing: they set the search path for dynamic libraries at runtime (it's not used while compiling).