I think gnome used to be fantastic but sadly lost their edge over time. I love plasma but it is still a bit too unstable for my liking.

Personally use Hyprland nowadays and I think I’ll never go back to using a DE anyways

I got portuex, never used Slackware but seems serviceable, I’m just scared of nVidia driver setup haha

I know you can basically turn arch into catchy, but I see no reason to when there is a pre made distro.

As for Nix, I think it looks very interesting but I very much love arch for my desktop and am not really looking for a replacement at the moment, but it is number one on my list for the future if things change

Cachyos.

Used to use pure arch but I like the cachy optimisations and their repos

Well if you don’t want plain arch I’d go with cachyos or just endeavouros

Arch (cachyos) on my desktop, Debian on my server.

Doesn’t really get any better than those two in my opinion

If manjaro is the most stable distro you’ve used you can’t have used a lot

If you spend some time looking into it you will realise how badly manjaro is run.

If a team can’t even manage to update their SSL certs in time (which is extremely simple to automate) and multiple times asked their users to set their system date back to solve it I really don’t think they are trustworthy when it comes to scraping user data.

It’s not that I expect them to use the data maliciously, I simply just don’t trust their security procedures when they fail to do something that simple.

But not to manjaro