I've been running an EndeavourOS setup for a few years now with almost zero hiccups. Great starting point.

Completely agreed. I’ve been using EndeavourOS for half a year now, and it’s great. It’s almost the same as vanilla Arch, just with more packages installed by default and a few UX improvements.

I switched from Manjaro to EndeavourOS last year after using Manjaro for two (Manjaro was my first experience with Linux as a daily driver) and agree with this fully. I much prefer using Arch's regular repositories to Manjaro's. But having used Manjaro as my first distribution (I shouldn't have been using an Arch-based distro, but that aside), I don't think EndeavourOS is a one-to-one normie replacement in all respects. While I don't need or want Manjaro's GUI tools now, Pamac and its GUI kernel/driver tools helped me make the adjustment from having only used Windows to Linux. I am sure I could have managed on EndeavourOS, but it would have been more difficult at the time.

The true replacement for casual users is Pop_OS. For more mid-tier users I’d recommend installing base Arch once, then wiping and installing OpenSUSE.

Using Arch without a bigger org managing it for you is kind of dangerous. Their policy is that they just wantonly push anything, and if there’s something wrong with a package they’ll tell you in the upgrade message. That you’ll have to manually evoke. And check for each package upgrade.

I learned a lot from setting up Arch a couple of times, but ultimately I think they have a few policies that are terrible for the average user or even company.

I use Pop_OS as my daily driver because of the existence of the NVIDIA version of the distro.

I work in Deep Learning, and the NVIDIA version comes in really handy.

I never face NVIDIA issues like my peers frequently complain.

I pop endeavouros cassini nova on most machine now (xfce), never gets in the way.. I used to roll with mint xfce but I needed an arch base.