But since they offered to do the “installation and set-up process” with me, I relented. (The scare quotes are there because it was not an ordinary installation process: my friend basically exorcised the Manjaro out of my system.)

😃

I have a few distros I would like to try, off the top of my head: EndeavourOS, Fedora Silverblue, and NixOS.

I am not a NixOS user but I have tried it a few times and I find it really impressive for some features. Though I feel intimidated by having to learn about more features. But the thing I find impressive so far is how to switch DEs so incredibly easy after a basic NixOS install. For example in case you're currently running XFCE4 :

• Edit the one NixOS configuration file to define the DE you prefer on one line, say GNOME, and add some more packages you want.
• Run the build switch command.
• Reboot (or logout and restart the relevant Display Manager if needed)
• Enter GNOME
• Edit the one NixOS configuration file again, remove the GNOME line, and insert a line with KDE Plasma
• Run the build switch command.
• Reboot
• Enter KDE Plasma.

It's like magic! 🐧

I still intend to show this to a Linux friend one day just for fun and sharing. And with clonezilla or rescuezilla it should be pretty easy and fast to recover from backups, show it to the friend, and then put Arch Linux back from backups.