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 I am not a huge fan of how certain packages on apt are a few years old and outdated.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 haven’t used it, but it seems like a thin wrapper over Arch so it should work pretty well.
If you don’t want to tinker but want a rolling release, give OpenSUSE Tumbleweed a shot. It has a lot going for it that other rolling releases tend to either not do or leave to the user, such as:
And packages are usually about as new as Arch, sometimes newer. I used Arch for ~5 years and Tumbleweed almost as long, and Tumbleweed seems to work better for me (less manual intervention, less breakage, etc). If you want a custom package, it doesn’t support the AUR, but it has a user repository that has pretty much everything I wanted from the AUR anyway.
Arch is great if you want to tinker and make a super customized setup, but if you just want newer packages, OpenSUSE Tumbleweed or Fedora is probably a better option.