I have used manjaro before and liked it a lot. Currently I’m running Garuda, but I have never used vanilla Arch so I’m honestly not 100% sure what extra Garuda brings to the table outside of a pre-customized ui and some “helper” apps - install went butter smooth and updates have been a breeze and I think that is thanks to Garuda specificly.

Personally a big fan of KDE plasma. The DE in popos was my biggest detractor but that’s just personal preference. It also probably helps that I’m on an all AMD system.