How to install software

[j1r1]

Hi Misko_2083,
first of all many thanks for putting together this very useful info.

Thanks guys, if you have any advice on how to make it even better please let me know.

You presented the options how to do installations correctly. Well, we have to live in real world. I believe it would be good to mention negative practices which exist and maybe cannot be avoided in some cases. What do I mean?
For example, I want to use linux for one of my hobbies - 3D printing. Applications do exist at linux platform (http://slic3r.org/download, http://www.pronterface.com/,...) but at their webpages it is "recommended" to use "precompiled packages" packed in tar.gz form. Surprisingly for the linux newbie (like me) the packages do not contain source code for compilation, but binary executables or Python scripts. Where to extract them? Any "installation" needed? There are just vague instructions about dependencies needed partly mixed together with instructions for compilation from github source code. How confusing for a linux beginner who has no experience with this. I guess these examples are not an exception. Some explanation would be really helpful.