I haven’t found Audacity to require any plugins. Maybe because I had a codec pack?
And it has a lot of options but I don’t use 98% of them. Mostly I trim the opening, closing, and maybe amplify or boost levels. Taking out clicks or other enhancements not so much.
I did prefer the Nero editing functions but it didn’t like working with my later CD-R drive and that didn’t export modified mp3s only a file that knew what alterations to apply.
Ah, maybe that was it. (It's been a while.) It seems like maybe the codec pack was the biggest problem and I never could get that to work... Am a bit hazy on that, though.
MS Word or Libre Office seem fairly straightforward to me now, too, at least for simple documents. But when I first encountered \ them - oh, yee Gods...
Wordpad (say, 2002 or so) would do almost everything I needed. Same sort of situation here.