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 I am not a huge fan of how certain packages on apt are a few years old and outdated.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?
When I built my new PC (January last year) with an Intel 12th gen I first wanted to install Debian, cause I’ve used it basically ever since I’ve used Linux, but the kernel shipped with Debian did not support Intel 12th gen yet, so I was looking for another distro with up to date kernels/packages and stumbled upon manjaro, but quickly realised that it had some issues, than went for a manual arch install just for the sake of it, some stuff broke and I couldn’t be bothered to fix it since I didn’t do much on the system set anyways, I kept my home partition and installed endeavour and have been using it ever since on all my machines (with the exception of a short trip to fedora on my work laptop. It is just arch and basically any thing on the arch wiki applies, the only difference is some sane defaults and packages/services you’d most likely want to install and configure on your arch system anyways, they’re just using the arch repos and have added a repo of their own with some “bundled” packages like DEs/WMs and AUR helpers
I agree with everything you said other than I would advise against using pamac. It will cause fewer problems than on Manjaro ( as EOS uses the real Arch repos ) but it may still cause problems.
I didn’t even know pamac was a thing outside of manjaro, but yes ofc just use paru (or yay or sth), nowadays I rarely ever use pacman itself, but use paru for basically anything