i first ran slackware about 2005 i think it was. tgz was also commonly used for gzipped tar archives. debs and rpm files are also tgz internally, i think, maybe they migrated to also supporting bzip2 and xz, with a different header. appimages, snaps and flatpaks are a similar format except with an embedded filesystem, i think at least one of them uses the same squash format as used with initrd. squashfs. there is a driver in the kernel that can mount these, though now there is drivers for all of them, i forget when that appeared, maybe around 2008-2010. the chances that someone passes you a tgz now are pretty low. at one time, bz2s were called tbz. after that the double extension became more common like tar.xz or tar.bz2, or tar.gz. nothing to beware of. it's a unix filesystem. you can manually install the slackware packages literally by just doing "tar xvf filename.tgz" at /. slashdot. the root filesystem.

fair. slack was nice. i consider arch to be the spiritual descendant. both drop upgrades at maybe more than 4x the sped of debs. what i hated about slack was how many times i destroyed my installation building stuff from scratch, usually experimental apps and especially drivers. ubuntu was less fragile. still, it amazed me how bugs i remember from 8 still existed until like 2022.

If I recall correctly though Arch is pretty good about avoiding making things unduly overly configured, preferring a mostly vanilla install of software where possible. This is SO crucial and is probably one of the biggest places I lose my mind with Debian derivatives. I shouldn't need documentation for using a package on Debian; reading software's official documentation should be sufficient to be accurate without major caveats about what was modified.