I made a post a few days ago asking your opinion on Manjaro and it was very mixed, with a slightly negative overall opinion. I heard some recommend EndeavourOS instead and did some online research and it seems to be pretty solid and not have the repository problem that Manjaro has.
Just for context I am a Linux noob and have only used Mint for about the past six months. While I don’t have any major complaints, I am looking to explore more distros and the Arch repository with its rolling releases. I am not a huge fan of how certain packages on apt are a few years old and outdated. However, I also don’t have the time to be always configuring my OS and just want something that works well out of the box.
Is EndeavourOS a solid choice?
I’ve been using it since it succeeded Antergos (2019ish) and I’ve really enjoyed it, I use it on most of my systems! It has really sane defaults and makes for a good Arch experience that doesn’t involve setting things up yourself. If you like XFCE, they have the best out of the box theming I’ve seen a distro have for it, but there are other DEs that you can pick (I think you need internet access during the install IIRC).
It has its own repository that has some nice apps in it (like AUR helpers). The community around the distro is also really good, whenever I’ve come across an issue posted on the forums everyone seems really chill and noob friendly.
Other than that, it’s basically a GUI Arch installer (an amazing one at that!) that doesn’t get in your way and it just works. There’s been probably one problem, in the four years I’ve used it, that wasn’t caused by me breaking things (the grub incident), but the distro’s response to that was very well done.
The only other distros I use are Arch and Debian, but EndeavourOS is always my recommendation for people newer to Linux. It just works.