These days I'm most interested in Endeavour and Garuda, mostly as gateways into the Arch world without the headaches. Endeavour seems more mature so that'll be my next install.
I'm giving up on Manjaro since it seems to lag and have odd discrepancies with Arch/AUR.
Going further back I liked Mint and SuSE and even Ubuntu, but the lack of gaming focus has driven me to other distros.
I'm on Manjaro since 5 years and don't have any lags or "odd discrepancies" with the AUR (AMD setup, xanmod kernel). The general antipathy towards Manjaro on is not justified IMHO.
Barely any, honestly. I only vaguely recall one or two instances in the past year where I couldn't find what I needed as a Flatpak or similar ready-to-go app. As a general user it's pretty great honestly and I'm impressed at how easy it's become.
Love both of those distros, Endeavour is committed (their philosophy) to no GUI, only CLI commands, so keep that in mind. Garuda Gaming edition is the best gaming distro out there imo, handy GUI to configure everything, great privacy controls/browser. Manjaro should never be used, they hold back packages for "testing" which goes against Arch in general and can break AUR packages, thus your system. Another good Arch distro, minimal with optimized kernels, a privacy browser based on Firefox, is CachyOS. Those three I would recommend for Arch, besides Arch itself.
Endeavour is committed (their philosophy) to no GUI, only CLI commands, so keep that in mind.
That's actually the first time I've seen that mentioned. It's not highlighted on their website, in fact I had to go digging for this old 2019 article to get some insight on the philosophy there.
I'm not afraid of CLI so this is fine. I'm not an expert by any means but using it more will push me to learn. The updater frontend in Manjaro is kind of inconsistent anyway (e.g. it only shows Flatpaks sometimes) so I've often found myself using pacman in the terminal already.
Yeah, they don't advertise it, but if you are on the forum, the devs let you know, especially if you need help with any GUI..."We don't support...." Not saying the devs are bad, lovely people, but that is just their thing.
It's not like you can't install Endeavour and then install Majaro's pamac anyway. Hell, I use Arch but still have pamac installed. Sometimes I just want a gui package manager.