I run linux on my gaming rig. I've had the best luck with performance of graphics cards with manjaro and pop. I am not a huge fan of gnome and prefer kde (FWIW, gnome works fine, I just prefer the feel of kde).

With the above in mind, I really like the newness of the packages on rolling distros like Manjaro/arch. Yes, it can break things but Manjaro tends to be a bit behind Arch on releases -- maybe this helps? The AUR is awesome. I also like several of the gui tools Manjaro has implemented to make graphics driver installs simpler.

Pop worked really well and was simplier for gaming -- especially on devices with hybrid graphics.

That being said, I haven't used Mint since the forums were hacked. I haven't used Ubuntu since they started devaluing their users (integrated Amazon?, forcing snap?). Fedora is nice but I found pop/manjaro better for gaming due to graphics support.

My advice to you -- what you are asking is one of the main benefits of linux -- personal choice.

So... get out your USB stick and try them. Use the forums to help you with the nuances and make each work for your needs. Then see what you prefer. Then donate to that project and its base project.

It's awesome to have choice.

Mankato is easy to use and looks nice but I’ve also been using it for years. It has the power of the AUR but if people are saying other might be better they might be right. I would just stick to something Arch based because of the AUR. I saw a comment about endeavor and I might try it myself.

I have other thoughts, but these are the most objective ones:

• The theme was integrated with all applications I tried and I didn't spot any problems with it. (I'd tell you I liked it, but that would be subjective)
• Installing via Pamac required knowing what source (repos, AUR, et cetera) you were installing from or to try multiple.
• My Brother wifi printer couldn't connect and I didn't find a guide to resolve it.
• I couldn't get audio to work correctly on my Thinkpad X1 Carbon 9th Gen.
• The forums seemed to be active.
• I ran it for a week in a VM without breaking anything. Didn't run for any length of time on bare metal due to the printer and sound issues.

Compared to Fedora and EndeavorOS:

• Default GNOME theming, of course also through.
• GNOME Store will show you all available sources when you search for the package on Fedora. For EndeavorOS I have to search two places on archlinux.org and flathub.
• My printer worked with Fedora out of the box. For EndeavorOS I found a detailed guide they put together.
• No audio issues on either.
• Fedora also has a large forum. The EndeavorOS forum seems to have fewer users.
• I ran Fedora on my laptop for 6 months. When I upgraded between versions, I ended up with two versions of some applications like "Terminal" and "GNOME Terminal," which was confusing. No breakages.
• I've been running EndeavorOS for 14 months. I broke GRUB when everyone else on Arch and EndeavorOS did. I still had the live USB, and EndeavorOS provided instructions on how to fix it, although it was written for Ext4 and I had to make some educated guesses since I use BTRFS. I was successful and that was my only breakage.

I haven't used Manjaro in years so my experiences are not up to date, but from my experiences it always felt unpolished and somewhat amateurish compared to other distributions, especially compared to Arch.

I've made Arch crash many times but part of their ideology is that Arch "is as stable as your are". So when I made Arch crash it always felt like a fault of my own.

Manjaro, however, that has marketed itself as a new user friendly distro borked itself after updates just as often as Arch. Back in the day at least. For a newbie oriented distro I don't think this is excusable.

Then Manjaro has done some really weird choices over the years, like with them shipping a proprietary office suite. As well as them not renewing their SSL certs in time for their forum. Several times...

Still, I don't like the idea of point release operating systems so I've always kept to rolling release systems, and if you want a solid rolling release then I have to recommend OpenSuse Tumbleweed. Haven't crashed even once in the 5+ years I've been using it on several PC's and servers (in the form of MicroOS).

It's been good for me. It has broke a couple of times, but it seemed pretty in par for any Linux distro. For me it was time to re-install. It has a cool package called "gnome-layout-switcher" that mimics popular desktops.

I moved because Debian was somewhat boring, Ubuntu was busy trying to make stuff nobody wanted. RPM based distros were bought by Oracle or IBM and felt like "old hat", ha ha sorry. Arch was the goal but I was feeling lazy so Manjaro it was. I'll probably try another Arch based distro because pacman tools are pretty good.

distro for noobs