Linux

Anything but Manjaro. I won’t get into the reasons why because it’s easy to find, but suffice it to say that it’s an amateur distro that makes dumb mistakes.

If you want rolling, Arch, Tumbleweed and Endeavour are the first places to look. Maybe even Fedora because it updates very fast, although it’s not rolling.

Yet another "Time to reccomend EndeavourOS" reply.

Seriously tho, EndeavourOS is a pretty solid distro, and not that different from what you're currently rocking (Manjaro is based on Arch) except well...it actually works as an Arch based distro should, unlike Manjaro. EndeavourOS's a bit on the light side tho, and it comes with no GUI Add/Remove Software outta the box, but if you don't like using the Konsole for that, nothing a "yay pamac-all" (or "yay pamac-all-no-snap") and a bit of installing the packages you want/need can't fix.

OpenSUSE Tumbleweed

Based on your requirements Arch Linux or OpenSuSe Tumbleweed is what you want

Run away from Manjaro.

Endevour OS, 100%. Is Arch but without the hassle. I did the same as you, Manjaro then Endevour. Couldn't be happier. Also we have similar hardware (nvidia 3080) and kde+wayland is working really good here. If you would like to try something else, Nobara is great, based on fedora but with some gaming patches.

In short: Manjaro sucks. No one should ever use it.

For rolling distro you should look at:

1. Opensuse Tumbleweed: latest packages, well tested, bullet proof reliability and built in system rollback. RPM based.

2. Garuda Linux: full flavoured ARCH. Very fast, has all the latest packages. Reliable. Built in rollback. Cool theming.

I’m going to also recommend EndeavourOS. Or, if you’re game, just go for Arch. Sure the first time you install will be painful, but you’ll learn a lot about how everything works together. Then you will be more proficient at fixing it if and when you break it.

Debian testing

There's nothing wrong with Manjaro. If you say that you're "reasonably happy with Manjaro so far, feels easy and intuitive" and you're not into distro-hopping then I see no reason for you to switch.

If you've already installed Arch on another machine you probably know these things already, but here's the basics for using an Arch-based distro (any Arch-based distro, this applies to all of them):

• You gotta keep rolling. You don't have to upgrade every day, you don't have to upgrade every week, but once every few months you should. That's the whole point of a rolling distro, if you don't want rolling you can look into point-release distros.
• It's best to use pacman -Syu on command line to do upgrades.
• Don't install critical stuff from AUR. Don't install AUR graphical drivers, or AUR kernels, or replace system packages with AUR packages.
• Don't install experimental kernels and especially don't uninstall all other kernels and only keep the experimental ones, that's just asking for trouble. Stick to stable/longterm kernels and always keep two versions around, just in case.

Specifically for Manjaro there's similar advice:

• Stick to the stable releases, don't mess around with testing or unstable unless you really know what you're doing.
• If you want to know what's coming in updates you can check out the announcements page. That's also where you can find tips for fixing various package upstream annoyances – in every release post, under "known fixes and workarounds" (which happen occasionally, it's the price you pay when using a rolling distro and staying on the bleeding edge).

I'd say either OpenSUSE Tumbleweed or either (depending on if you want a graphical installer) EndeavourOS or Arch.

OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, one of the default DE's they offer is KDE.

I'd usually recommend Linux Mint, but since you seems to be up for a challenge, how about Gentoo?

Otherwise for something more mild, you can go for OpenSUSE Tumbleweed.

If you want to be a little adventurous, just install vanilla arch and it will be great, but if you want a little bit of a easier install with all the same benefits, use endeavor os.

If you want something not arch based the only thing I can recommend is OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, I've heard great things about it.

Also about Hyprland and Nvidia, I've been using Hyprland for some months now with Nvidia and it's been working great. I do have a significantly older card then you, but it could be worth a try to see if it works. You just have to follow the Hyprland wiki very carefully and you should be fine.

I'm just like you, newbie-intermediate Linux user who recently jumped from Windows to (Ubuntu then) Manjaro. What's wrong with Manjaro?

Just "man up" and do a minimal install of (any distro you want), and (manually) install the things you want via the package manager.

...no really. All it takes is two commands (one to search for the package you want, and the another one to install it).

"b-buh its my first ti--"

DO IT

This rolling release thing was just a terrible time in my Linux life. It's like you are scared of the "you have to start from the ground, erase everything, thing if you want to install win7 or winXP" but the price for a rolling release is a hell of updates every day.

I am done with this annoying updates. Debian has both world's, the stable side just updates if your security is at risk and the unstable branch is near the same like a rolling release and what Debian calls "unstable" is more stable than any arch-based distro. Btw a change between stable and unstable can be done at every time after install.

I personally prefer fedora because its as stable as Debian but has mostly actual packages like rolling releases. And would be my advice for op. BTW. Try out kinoite. Undestroyable Linux is the hot shit actually.

https://fedoraproject.org/kinoite/

And don't be scared about not rolling release, a version change is just a big update. Nothing got destroyed like in the good old windows time.

Man I used arch for a while and many other "bleeding edge" distros and I just can't get enough of Fedora. It is so stable and has such reasonable defaults. I use the fedora kde spin and have zero issues with my setup. Now since you are on nvidia you may have more issues, since by default fedora only ships the open source nvidia drivers and you would have to use https://rpmfusion.org/Configuration to get the nonfree stuff. Also you'd have to use dnf which is very similar to apt in my eyes and is very easy to use. Fedora even gets stuff sooner than arch on ocassion which is nice.

I do enjoy my time with fedora and for the most part it has very little setup. It's a very set it and forget it distro

OpenSuse Tumbleweed is an excellent choice, if you want the most stable rolling release distro.

High quality OS.

I've already mentioned this a couple of time this week, so I hope no one get bothered. But I can't recommend Xerolinux enough (page). I think it's what you may like. Rolling release, gorgeous KDE, a ready to use as is system. I've been distro hopping for a while but this made me settled.

I switched to fedora some months ago and I've been really enjoying it. Maybe worth a shot.