Linux

automatic hardware detection

I don't understand that point at all. How is Arch different in that regard & I'm asking this as an experienced Linux user managing multiple Debian & Arch boxes.

So I wanted to hear some experiences of you, that you may have had in the past considering EndeavourOS, CachyOS, Manjaro and Arch itself.

If you want to go down this road & are confident in your technical ability & mental fortitude to maintain such a system long term, then just go with vanilla Arch & go through the installation process once. The real difficulty of Arch is dealing with the every day minor & major breakages that come with updates. Learning something from the install procedure is actually helpful with that. The main point is that not only is the real difficulty maintenance, but none of the popular Arch flavors do anything meaningful to help with that. It's just you and the terminal at the end of the day. Saving a couple hours on the install process is not going to help you at all.

Manjaro is conceptually garbage ran by incompetent people so it's not even worth considering.

I personally have gone for Manjaro now, kind of hoping that it won’t break on the attempt to cut themselves of the company side of Manjaro and becomming they’re own non-profit.

Oh okay, oof. Let me explain then. Their concept of holding back packages by one week & still having / advertising the AUR means additional instability. This or that library or dependency gets an update & then the updated AUR package will break with your one week old stuff. Furthermore far more often than not they still push the broken package, because they would need a similar contributor base to main Arch to actually vet & test everything which they'll never have no matter what they do. What they call an additional safety net is almost never one. Sure if Arch pushed a broken grub update, that's like the one thing you could a avoid with Manjaro, but if you cannot fix / research such a problem (chroot or refind & reinstall grub), then you have no business using such a distro to begin with.

CachyOS is in a weird spot, but I cannot really recommend them, because they push new kernels too soon, to the point of ridiculousness.

EoS is vanilla Arch with a gui installer basically. It's barely a distro, but their community forums are great for new users to ask "dumb" questions. I can fully recommend every noob Arch user this community, they'll help you even if you are not using EoS, they've certainly helped & taught me a lot back then.

Garuda is the same as EoS, but there is some added graphical flare, which you can add yourself to any Linux system if you wanted to.

If you are a new user who is worried about old packages, then you should be using Fedora, that's pretty much it. Arch can be good too, but it's for a technical user who is really interested in Linux beyond just using their computer.