[Night_Thastus]

I've never used Lineage, but this is part of my question.

Can you use the ordinary app store to download apps as you can on a normal Android phone? Or do you need to do some shuffle of downloading them on a PC and transferring some kind of apk file to install it on the phone manually.

Do most apps work 'out of the box', or are there incompatibilities?

[foresto]

Google Play works if present, as do apps installed from it.

Some people prefer to exclude it for privacy reasons. I don't know if the official Lineage builds include it, as I am one such person, but it's available here: https://opengapps.org/

[luuurker]

LineageOS recommends "MindTheGapps": https://wiki.lineageos.org/gapps/

OpenGapps stopped being updated some time ago and doesn't support newer Android versions.