EndeavourOS

It has all the benefits of Arch without a downside of a painful installation. Once i tried it a few years ago, i never looked back

It has got the AUR, i use it on my 2011 iMac and everything works and it's rolling release

It's basically Arch for beginners, basically one of the best Linux distro.

Terse and helpful documentation. Quick to install. Pleasant to use. Active community. No two-week update lag such as Manjaro, and I feel it runs faster with less bugs. Don't get me wrong, I paid for Manjaro before, I do not dislike it, but EndeavourOS is my go-to choice.

EndeavourOS is a solid Arch-based distro. They are transparent and my impression is that the community is friendly. They have done a nice job with documentation and information.

When the GRUB boot incident happened in 2022 (not their fault, btw) they put up a great article addressing the issue and how to fix it in an informative and helpful manner.

What happened was that an update to GRUB in Arch broke a lot of installations. This was relatively easy to fix. While others were quiet, EndevourOS provided help and information.

They have a bunch of helpful articles and a nice welcome-app that helps users to learn.

The distro itself is lightweight and is well put together out of the box.

Something I do not like about it, however, is the package manager. It will be hard for beginners to understand as the commands are hard to remember and case-sensitive. Even enthusiasts could rightfully be frustrated by it.

Compare this to the package manager in Fedora which has easy to remember commands like "dnf update, dnf install, dnf search etc." while Pacman has commands like "pacman -Syu, pacman -S, pacman -Ss etc.".

As you can see, the commands for DNF in Fedora is self-explanatory and any beginner could guess what they do. The commands in pacman are cryptic and not descriptive at all. To add insult to injury, they are case sensitive. If you do "pacman -s" it will not work.

You could easily make aliases so that you could do "pacman update, pacman install, pacman search etc." but it requires configuration and it deviates from the default behaviour. Meaning, the same problem is there on every other distro with pacman and for every new install you would need to configure it. Perhaps a non-issue for an enthusiast with post-install scripts and an interest to tinker. But for many others and especially those who are beginners - it is not a good command naming scheme and is also the reason I would recommend Fedora over EndeavourOS.

However, if this is not an issue for you, this distro is pretty nice. Both technically and visually. The presentation is kind of unique.