When you install any new distro, most of the time it does not come with the video and audio codecs to play videos online and offline.
The best way in my opinion to use codecs without spending hours installing is:
Install needed apps as flatpak.
The most common apps that need codecs is browsers and video players like vlc and mpv.
Just install them(Make sure you enable flathub repo) as flatpak (installed by default in most distros) and you will not need to spend time installing codecs from untrusted third party repos ever again.
What kind of issues do you have? Never had any using Debian, Ubuntu or arch
It’s more of I don’t want to spend hours installing essentials rather than a real issue.
Opensuse, stock debian, fedora, clear linux.
I suffered through this enough number of times till I learned to install browsers this way.
By the way the reason you did not notice any issue in codecs is that ubuntu and arch come with codecs.