For me
Mint
Manjaro
Zorin
Garuda
Neon
Seeing a lot of Manjaro here, what’s the deal? I installed it just yesterday on a test machine to check it out as I plan on steering over from windows long-term so just browsing what’s out there. Don’t really have issues and it ticks the boxes of a more user-friendly installation and comes out of the box with Plasma. I may try out pure Arch or the GUI fork just not to have the hassle of setting up the DE
Manjaro is a really good distro to start with. It has very nice defaults including the correct zsh plugins. Should make your transition to Arch whenever the time comes very smooth. It does have a bad reputation because they don’t seem to manage it well (e.g. keys keep expiring), and the said defaults are implemented in a very hacky way (if you see the code). Also they follow a delayed release which is really unnecessary given Arch is stable already; and in fact the delay can cause issues if you use AUR (which you will, eventually discover and learn about and love).
You have to manually manage new kernel branches with the manjaro-settings-manager.
Lots of people get told “it’s arch with good defaults! Just sudo pacman -Syu and you’re good!”
…which leads to them eventually breaking their systems and blaming manjaro.
No rolling release is appropriate for people who can’t RTFM.
