Manjaro is deceptively attractive to me. I don't know how much it diverged from Arch Linux in the decade and change that it's been around. That being said, there's something that just fundamentally unnerves me about its "delayed" rolling release model. I mean, Debian Testing and CentOS Stream both occupy similar niches; yet they've both got massive community (and enterprise in Stream's case) backing to ensure
some modicum of quality control.
This blog post by Allan McRae, one of the committers to Arch Linux at the time of writing, outlined some pretty fundamental design flaws with the distro. Mind you, McRae's criticism stems from the project's overly ambitious beginnings when it was still
very rough around the edges. I know that Manjaro has changed significantly since then, but I still can't bring myself to "trust" it.
Debian Testing ultimately builds into Debian Stable X.0; CentOS Stream eventually builds into RHEL X.0 (and its many de-branded clones). Manjaro, to this effect, does not use its delayed rolling release model to build onto a more stable platform. It just elects to temporarily dam up the rolling release from Arch's repositories, "test" them for a couple of weeks, then release "as-is" with minimal (if any) patching. I've had Arch installs borked by critical updates of stuff like glibc, Pacman, and the like where I neglected to read the Arch Linux home page to get the instructions for X/Y/Z workaround to critical updates that
will bork if executed blindly.
I don't know if the same has ever happened on Manjaro, but the thought alone puts me off from ever giving it a chance for a long-term home use situation. If I really wanted long-term stable, I'd just go with Rocky Linux or anything built off of Debian Stable.