What’s your goal? Is it safe to match is a very open ended question.

Take RHEL, it’s meant to be a paid distro for enterprise, something Debian isn’t. But you could draw similarities too.

What’s are you trying to learn?

There are tools like rss bridge that can be a big help: https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge

YouTube wise I use invidious rewrite rules

I’m kind of addicted to miniflux.

I use it to aggregate my RSS l, GitHub release notes, & YouTube feeds so I can stay up to date

Nope, it seems to just work!

I’ve found it best to avoid the pacman repo. It can leave my system in such a weird inbetween state. Seeing as you mostly want codecs I tend to prefer flatpaks for VLC, Firefox, etc.

If you insist on pacman, just wait. If you try to dup and have a conflict it means that either pacman or suse repos aren’t all updated so hold on a few days and you should be able to dup with no issues.