I looked at Manjaro VERY briefly, and I played with Endeavor a bit. I installed several distros as VMs just to poke around. I found Debian familiar which is likely the main reason I find myself leaning that way.
I use Mint, PopOS, or Arch/EndeavourOS more or less interchangeably. I’ve sincerely never had any issues with Arch’s stability. The term “stable” when describing a distro refers more to the package versions than system stability or overall reliability. Things aren’t necessarily broken cause they’re more up to date. Back in 2020, my laptop didn’t play well with Ubuntu 20.04 because of some power management issue caused by a kernel bug. My only real option was getting off of LTS and switching to 20.10 which had a newer fixed kernel version. So in effect, the Ubuntu LTS was less “stable” for me because of them keeping the kernel version stable.
YMMV, obviously, but most of what I’m doing when doing a fresh install is installing the packages I need, and configuring them. I can do this pretty much regardless of the distro. Most of the difference is if those packages are available in the first place, and how I’ll have to install them if they aren’t in the base repositories. Configs/dotfiles are usually pretty portable. The rest is just well… Linux as usual.
