Debian+KDE for workstations and servers, arch+kde for specialty needs and playtime.

For me it’s pretty simple:
-older hardware/no need for up to date packages - Debian
-new hardware, needs up-to-date software - Arch
And that’s it. Though obviously, you can also use flatpak if you truly need newer versions of software. Personally I have arch on my gaming PC + Debian on my multimedia-consumption laptop.

EndeavourOS is the way to go, btw.

Just arch with gnome

For a mediacenter that isn’t on bleeding edge hardware, fedora or Debian would be my choice for stability. Performance will be similar regardless of distro.

I use arch on my desktop and laptop and Debian/Ubuntu on servers.

I use Arch btw. It’s quite touchy, definitely not the best distro. Do it

EndeavourOS. It’s like Arch, but a bit easier with a few automation and gui stuff builtin. It’s still heavy on terminal usage and it comes light out of the box. I switched from Manjaro to EndeavourOS, because Manjaro gave me some problems (especially their package manager and because of the AUR too, and I didn’t like the maintainers, no further comment). It’s my daily driver for years now. I use it for everything, daily usage, little programming, gaming on Steam and especially RetroArch too. I’m a huge RetroArch fan. :-) So if you plan to use base Archlinux or Manjaro, then I can recommend to use EndeavourOS a lot.

Cachy OS is probably a good choice too, because their focus on performance optimizations. But they do also have a bit more, let’s say bloat, out of the box and their branding is a bit strong it seems. It’s a bit farther away from base Archlinux than EndeavourOS is.

EndeavorOS is my go to for arch based systems. But with the archinstall script I’d say just give vanilla a go

Artix

Arch in the front, Debian in the back(end). I run Arch on my laptop and Debian on my homeserver. I’ve ran Debian on laptops before and if stable is getting older hardware support can be a struggle, much better on a rolling distro like Arch. And having all the newest toys on your desktop is very very nice. While on my homeserver I mostly want stability, everything else runs in (podman) containers anyway.

Cachy is a distro I would consider, because it’ll theoretically give you slightly better battery life due to the optimised compiles, although I’m not sure you’ll ever really notice. Manjaro has a reputation of breaking far more often than Arch does, so that one’s a no for me.

If you don’t want to spend your time larping sysadmin I’d recommend one of the uBlue images as Kodi, Retroarch and Steam are available from Flathub. If you want to spend your time keeping your media center alive (and possibly learn something about Linux in the process), go ahead with Arch or any of its derivatives. I use Aurora, btw.

I used to experiment around with various distros some years past until I got into Arch. Haven’t distro hopped once since, I’ve completely erased Windows from my life and I’m gaming exactly as I would if I was on Windows. I never have trouble finding a package since almost everything exists either in the official repositories or in the AUR, and I get the latest versions with all the new features and fixes. Rarely some things do break because of the rolling releases, but it’s almost always just a matter of a single google search to fix. For me it’s worth it for having all the latest versions of everything.

My opinion would be different for a server or a work laptop where stability is much more important. For servers I would pick Debian for sure, for work laptop I’d consider Fedora probably

Omarchy for me.

I’ve had great success with Garuda Linux. I’m running the KDE “Mokka” version.

It’s quite opinionated, so be aware of that, but it’s been very reliable on my HP laptop (it even has hibernation support!) and the built-in apps are top notch.

Just be aware that Arch-based distros tend to shun things like Flatpaks in favor of their own repositories and the Arch User Repository (AUR), and there aren’t any friendly point and click app stores like KDE Discover or GNOME Software. You will have to install apps using the command line or tools like Octopi, which is great if you know exactly what you’re looking for, but terrible for app discovery.

Since I mostly use Flatpaks, I installed Bazaar. You can install Discover, but it only works for Flatpak.

I used to run Manjaro, but after it left two of my computers in an unbootable state after an upgrade a few years ago, I moved on.

I’ve always gravitated toward various Arch-based distros. Installed vanilla from scratch a decade ago for a college workstation, sunk a lot of time into tinkering the steam deck’s SteamOS, and my desktop’s been running CachyOS for just about a year now - the latter’s been so smooth that I opted to wipe my Deck and install their handheld edition just because, and that’s been pretty solid too.

I haven’t really distro-hopped enough to say much else, but Cachy’s been my go-to since I first set it up and it’d take a lot to move me off if it. All the Arch benefits with some extra bells and whistles.