I’ve heard of Manjaro, but on the occasions when I’ve brought it up in conversation, people have almost unanimously warned me off from it in fairly strong terms… not entirely sure why, but that alone makes me reluctant to use it.
Another Arch/AUR-compatible distro with a more automated install process is EndeavourOS. Last time I checked, it was closer to vanilla Arch than Manjaro. But I've mainly used it for spinning up VMs to work remotely. For a long-term workstation I still feel better sticking to plain Arch.
Big ones are: shadiness with funding, letting their SSL certs expire 4 times, and the fact that their idea of stable isn't additional testing, but just letting the packages sit for a week.
Well, the funding issue I find to be quite trivial and of no big concern to me, but the repo issues are indeed something that has bothered me at times, where I ended up modifying repos to get the most up to date ones.
The recommendation from the repo, EndeavourOS sounds interesting, though.
The link for the post is dead, but they've let their SSL cert expire multiple times. While it happened a few years ago, I find that a hard thing to come back from.
Manjaro is like Arch but not exactly like Arch. If you have a problem with Manjaro and then go to the (stellar) Arch documentation to try to figure out why it doesn't work in a case like this, that documentation won't help you.
I mean that's not true: I daily drive ubuntu and the arch wiki has been very kind to me. But to slightly rework you point, if you're a manjaro user expecting the arch wiki to apply 1:1 to your system, you're mistaken and are in for a bad time.
Well, this I cannot confirm. I regular go to the normal Arch docs for help and usually find it suitable. So it is not fundamentally different, but yes, it uses different repos and some things indeed work differently.
Maybe have a look at manjaro, it is based on arch, but comes prepackaged, so you can just boot up the luve image and install, if everything works.