Manjaro isn’t recommended. They made lots of weird decisions and mistakes in the past, maybe still do. Wouldn’t trust them. Endeavour or Cachy are the current recommendations for “easy Arch”. If you’re able to install and maintain vanilla Arch, I’d recommend Arch though. Cut the middleman.

Hell yeah I use Arch btw. It’s been a really solid experience and nowhere close to as sweaty as one might assume.

Vanilla arch

In no case manjaro

Hi, in my opinion, the best distro is always the one that everything builds upon. So if you want maximal control, etc. Just use arch. Its also great if you want to learn how to troubleshoot.

The only Arch distros I know that are solid are Arch itself, Steam OS, and Cachy OS. The latter 2 have meaningful optimizations for their intended use which is really the only excuse for a new derivative IMO besides things like different release schedules.

Do you use Arch?

Not currently but I have in the past.

Best Arch distro?

Just install vanilla Arch. If you don’t want to install it manually, archinstall works fine. But you really should install it manually, following the Installation Guide on the Arch Wiki, at least once.

Don’t use Manjaro.

Arch if you want to do the install completely by yourself and/or have some setup that can’t be replicated by the usual installers.

EndeavourOS/Cachy if you want a simple GUI installer for Arch, but you don’t get bragging rights.

Don’t use Manjaro

Here, I fixed your post for you:

I’ve been wanting to tell people that I use Arch.

I’ve been considering the following distros:

• Arch
• Not Arch
• Not Arch
• Any others?

I’m leaning towards Arch or Not Arch.

Just plain Arch, been using it for the past 5 years. Haven’t told anyone unless askes though.

But I’ve been wanting to tell people that I use Arch.

Biblically accurate arch user

EndeavourOS is my first choice, CachyOS is my second choice.

Stay away from Manjaro.

I’ve heard great things about Endeavor and Cachy, but personally use Garuda. Highly recommend it.

EndeavorOS is my go to for arch based systems. But with the archinstall script I’d say just give vanilla a go

Used to be Manjaro, because it’s got sane opinions and I’m not looking to make maintaining that machine a new hobby. I don’t mind the curated “almost” rolling release, but they’re getting worse about simple things (like maintaining their own certs) and I’ve decided to move on.

EndeavourOS. It’s like Arch, but a bit easier with a few automation and gui stuff builtin. It’s still heavy on terminal usage and it comes light out of the box. I switched from Manjaro to EndeavourOS, because Manjaro gave me some problems (especially their package manager and because of the AUR too, and I didn’t like the maintainers, no further comment). It’s my daily driver for years now. I use it for everything, daily usage, little programming, gaming on Steam and especially RetroArch too. I’m a huge RetroArch fan. :-) So if you plan to use base Archlinux or Manjaro, then I can recommend to use EndeavourOS a lot.

Cachy OS is probably a good choice too, because their focus on performance optimizations. But they do also have a bit more, let’s say bloat, out of the box and their branding is a bit strong it seems. It’s a bit farther away from base Archlinux than EndeavourOS is.