I've been using Manjaro (XFCE edition) as my daily driver, both on a laptop and a desktop system for more than 6 years now. I've tried many others beforehand: Ubuntu and its variations, Arch, Fedora, Tumbleweed, ...

But Manjaro was what made me stop hopping around. While it's true that it has some pitfalls (e.g. cert issues, AUR incompatibility at times), to this day it's working well enough for me that I don't feel like switching away.

I'm not just browsing web on it either. Software engineering, music production, image and video processing, etc.

Then again, I don't consider myself a beginner at this point and can troubleshoot a fair amount of issues now that I simply couldn't when I started using Linux more than a decade ago.

I also try to:

• not overdo the amount of AUR stuff I use
• read the official forum post BEFORE whenever I run a system update

I also always appreciated the fact that I could get away with not doing a system update for like six weeks and then do a big one (as mentioned, in combination with reading their update announcement). That's always something that didn't quite work for me on Arch in the past (then again, I still was a beginner back then, so most "reinstall to solve this problem" situations back then were on me).

What if Manjaro really would get worse enough so I'd want to switch? I guess EndeavourOS would be an option, because it's very close to Arch, but at the same time, it seemingly offers a graphical installer that hopefully will set itself up properly on a laptop. Then again, I haven't installed Arch in quite a while now. Maybe the install experience has gotten much nicer.