I'm going to say Gentoo Linux. It's a good learning tool and I suppose maybe a tiny bit faster if you actually custom-compile everything for your hardware from source, but that's a crazy waste of time.

I agree with you.

I don't hate Manjaro's developers, but they simply do not know what they are doing. They over promise and under deliver.

I don't get the hate for Manjaro, TBH. I never had any problem with it, and I used it as my main OS for a few years now.

I swear it is my machine or something, but despite CachyOS claiming being faster and more optimized I have yet to benchmark it as faster than the stock kernel for things I play around with. I wrote an application in rust to process a large text file and it both compiled and ran slower on CachyOS. I play around with llama.cpp and again it compiles and runs slower on CachyOS. I want to like Cachy, but right now all I can see is a bunch of window dressing to stock Arch with KDE and a couple of themes that I would rather change to default.

Also, why in the hell am I being asked to make a wifi password encryption key with the damn USB installer? CachyOS is not the only one. A lot of KDE using distros pop up the encryption window when you setup WiFi on the install image. Why? You want me to temporarily encrypt my wifi password on a temporary live image??? I just slows me down.

Anyways, I'm sure I'm crazy and clearly it is fast for somebody, but I can't even get games to benchmark higher.

OpenSUSE, awfull default software selection on desktop, and pushing users hard to use an "everything configuration tool".

Manjaro always broke on me. I can't even trust them to keep their SSL certs up to date.

Sorry Manjaro devs, no hate, I just got burned way too many times by this arch-not-arch frankendistro.

Probably PoP_OS!. There isn't anything wrong with the os itelf, my problem is rather that its often sugested as a beginer friendly distro which in my experience it absolutely isn't. The amount of issues I encountered while trying to use it almost drove me away from Linux as a whole. (It was the first distro i tried) The time I spent trying to make everything work was comparable to Arch.

I realy like the idea and the DE they ship by default is one of the best ones I've seen (it's like GNOME but in my opinion much better) but the bugs make it a terrible suggestion for new users.

Manjaro, because we're here on arch to use the AUR, and that breaks Manjaro basically every time.

Fedora. It doesn't really add anything and is just more stuff for people to get distracted by.

Also, red hat is responsible for shilling a lot of bullshit.

Evil Linux Suprise™

idk why people even use it. too scary for me.