So what happens is that changing the keyboard language comes together with the CPU upgrade from Intel® Core® i3-1315U to Intel® Core® i7-1360P. That's what you pay for*. I agree with you that they might have done a better job at conveying what's happening. For whatever it's worth, I didn't immediately notice this myself. Therefore I tried to contact them in hopes of resolving the issue. They responded very quickly (like within a couple of minutes) and explained what was going on. Props to them for that!

How long did you try using Vi (or any other "mode-switch vietnam-era editors with cult like followings")? Have you experimented with any starter kit/distribution/config (or whatever) to ease you in? What do you use now?

Btw, I agree that stand-alone Vi probably is too far of a departure from modern IDEs. As far as I know, it's not even possible to give it IDE-like functionality apart from a few basic ones. Both Vim and especially Neovim do a better job at bridging the distance. FWIW, Vim only exists like for three decades now, while Neovim's first release happened in 2014; almost 10 years ago.

Thanks for answering! Much appreciated!

I might be a distro hopper. Every distro just niggles me after a while

Perhaps you've yet to find the one 😜. Your criticism to the different distros is fair though.

I thought Arch because it is almost always up to date and seems to be widely recommended.

Yup, it's by far the most popular rolling release distro. Though, I'd argue that openSUSE Tumleweed -while not as popular- is definitely worth checking out as well. They're, however, quite different from one another. Arch offers a blank canvas, while openSUSE Tumbleweed is relatively opinionated; though it does offer excellent defaults. You would have to make up your own mind whichever 'style' of maintaining a distro suits you best.

I had a go at installing Arch today in a VM using archinstall and set up BTRFS with Timeshift and grub-btrfs and it all seemed fairly straightforward.

Well, that sure does sound promising!

OP was relatively verbose so I act accordingly. Don't feel compelled to read larger pieces if you're sensitive to wasting your time. I don't recall forcing you to read it, so it's entirely on you. While information density might have suffered, "little info" is too harsh. Though, as long as there's even one sentence of 'original' information (compared to all the other comments) a piece of writing of that length is worth reading IMO. Though, thinking otherwise is definitely justifiable.

Why does Linux do that’s “better” than Windows? That’s not meant to inflame anyone. More so what do you personally like better.

Linux offers me freedom and control over my systems far beyond Windows (or any proprietary OS for that matter) does. This allows me to:

• Setup a system of which its parts have been deliberately chosen by yours truly to satisfy my particular needs and my needs only. And I can make it obey whatever I will. It won't do a thing I didn't require of it, nor will it overrule any of my configs at a later point in time.

• Not have any spyware injected by the OS. Thus offering actually good privacy by default (for a change).

• More 'modern' ways of maintaining a system are only properly supported on Linux. Fully declarative systems like NixOS/Guix have yet to show up for other OSes. Furthermore, while the likes of Android, iOS and macOS do have 'immutability' (at least) sprinkled to them. Windows has yet to show the capabilities of their CorePC. One might even argue that it's uncertain if it will come out in the near future as CoreOS (10X) didn't see the light of day either. Linux, on the other hand, offers a plethora of 'immutable' distros that should suit ones needs regardless.

What can I expect to find as a casual observer?

Perhaps not much of it honestly 😅. Sure, you should find a gratis system that just works and doesn't hoard your data. Updates go smoother, it'll have improved performance on older devices. And if you actually know what you're doing, then it'll have better performance on your newer devices as well. Installing software is just one command away by default. But some of the more advanced benefits might rely on a more profound understanding, which you may or may not be interested to indulge yourself with.

I'm not very well-versed into all of this, but if what you're referring to is technically known as Unified Kernel Image, then you should know that unfortunately it's currently not supported on systems that rely on ostree; thus unsupported on Silverblue. A lot of work has been gone into this over the last year, but I'm afraid we're still (at least) two major releases removed from proper UKI support. For regular Fedora, consider referring to this excellent guide.

Becase of that and your recommendation I will probably switch to silverblue.

Silverblue is incidentally also my daily-driver; custom image through uBlue's template to be more precise*.

Im a little scared of selinux (I was thinkering too much with fedora) but better with it than without.

Yup, SELinux is definitely a double-edged sword in that it's very powerful but can therefore be a bit more restrictive. Though, currently it's our only bet when it comes to confining containers as it's (vastly) superior over AppArmor in that aspect. Which explains openSUSE's recent conversion from AppArmor to SELinux for their distros that rely heavily on container workflows; like MicroOS, Aeon, Kalpa etc. Unfortunately it's not the easiest to understand, but I'm sure you'll manage 😉!

For AUR apps I will use distrobox.

Hehe, you know what's good 😛.

You can install Distrobox on Fedora (or any of the distros that support it), create a Debian distrobox on your Fedora install, and within the Debian distrobox you can use apt-get to install whichever Debian package you like. Or..., you could make an Arch distrobox and even install stuff from the AUR. Or really any package from any of your favorite distros as long as it's supported.

Somehow it looks veiny, black and kinda nsfw...

The very same ones when one compares Fedora Workstation to Fedora Silverblue. Which mostly come down to Bazzite offering more stability, improved security, reproducibility, atomic updates and a pinch of declarativity^[1]^ at the expense of relearning a thing or two and actually being limited in some (rather niche) actions that are currently not supported on Silverblue (and thus -by extension- Bazzite). Chances are rather slim that the average Nobara-user would delve into any of those unsupported actions. So if you ever happen to stumble upon something you're not able to do/perfom on Silverblue/Bazzite/uBlue then it's safe to assume that you're not approaching it correctly and that a different approach would have resulted in the desired outcome.

1. Regular Silverblue is not very declarative, if at all. However, the toolkit that uBlue offers -and which is used by Bazzite to create its image- enables one to have some degree of declarativity. It's by no means comparable to the likes of NixOS or Guix, but it's only going to get better from here.

(Manjaro keeps breaking itself for a laugth)

Are you perhaps using the AUR more than you should on a Manjaro installation? Just for your information; because Manjaro holds back packages for a couple of weeks, any package from the AUR might conflict with those 'outdated' packages and thus cause some breakage. If you really need those packages, then you should consider container solutions like Distrobox to resolve this. Note that trying things like installing a custom kernel won't work through Distrobox.

So the main options probably consist of:

• Just plain Arch; archinstall has made it a lot easier to install. Furthermore, after everything is set and done, it can literally be Manjaro without outdated packages and less bugs etc, or actually whatever you would like your Linux installation to be. Setting up is the most daunting part though. Fortunately, the Arch Wiki does an excellent job in providing a resource at every set of the journey. Recommended if you're not scared of setting up your system from a blank slate.

• Any other Arch-based distro, really. There are a ton of recommendations found in the other comments and there's even more if you check out Distrowatch for Arch-based distros. If you kinda know what you'd want from a future system, but can't be bothered with setting it up directly from Arch, then this might be recommended based on the specifics of your demands and to what degree existing distros align to that. For whatever it's worth, I think Garuda Linux is an interesting option for those that want to move on from Manjaro. Similary to Manjaro, it's opinionated on how your system is/should be configured. That's why it's also one of the few Arch-based distros (like Manjaro) that offers -out of the box- the means to rollback to a working system whenever anything unfortunate befalls your system, Garuda achieves this through coming pre-configured with Btrfs+Snapper. It should be noted, though, that Garuda is considered bloated by some. However only you can decide for yourself if their offering is bloated to you or not. So check out its Xfce edition -or any that sound interesting to you- for yourself, if you're interested. If you think it's interesting, but are still too much bothered by the bloat, then perhaps their Lite versions are more to your liking.

There are a lot of options beyond Arch-based distros. However, as I don't know what made you gravitate towards Manjaro in the first place and what you've come to (dis)like since, it's hard to pinpoint what exactly you'd like. If the AUR has been your main reason for using Manjaro in the first place, then it's important to note that Distrobox also grants access to the AUR from any of the other popular distros out there. So you're not confined to just using Arch(-based distros) unless you really need some custom kernel that is somehow only available in the AUR.

• If you checked out Manjaro for its unsuccessful attempt at providing a stable rolling release, then you should check out the most successful attempt with openSUSE Tumbleweed. It has a respectable amount of packages and enables users through OBS (OpenSUSE Build Service) to extend this significantly. Its installer offers the option to go for a minimal installation.
• If rolling release has scarred you, but you still want up-to-date packages, then consider Fedora. Huge community, AUR-like repo in COPR and once again a very respectable amount of packages make it definitely worth a mention. It offers the so-called Fedora Everything ISO (Network Installer) that acts as the installer for minimal systems.

First of all, I think it's important to state that the 'default' settings that distros ship with and thus you're met with right after a fresh installation try to target a sweet spot in which a lot more besides performance is considered; reliability, security, stability etc. However, depending on your workload and your hardware configuration, it's possible to have it more optimized towards performance through 'tinkering-means'.

However workload, metrics, system and hardware configuration provide so much variability that an exhaustive comparison between distros is just hard to do right. It's possible to find some on Phoronix (and ~~Reddit~~), but testing it yourself on your own hardware is a lot more valuable.

Still, it's possible to draw some basic conclusions based on the available data and common sense:

• Newer versions of the kernel generally have optimizations related to performance, especially for newer hardware. So -for performance sake- it makes sense to pick a distro that always tries to stay as close as possible to the latest kernel release.

• Overhead is in almost all cases detrimental to performance, so more minimal systems seem to score better. A lot of distros offer an ISO that's meant for minimal installations, so those are perhaps worth checking out.

• Compiling yourself (with performance optimizations) or using packages that have been compiled with performance optimizations in mind provide significant improvements that might be worth your time.

Beyond these three it becomes very murky, real quick. I guess (custom) kernel patches/optimizations are worth a mention, but you would have to benchmark it yourself on your own hardware to see if they're even worth the hassle (spoiler alert: some of them should, but it's best to stay objective and without any expectations regarding them).

I'd like to end this with naming some distros that might be worth mentioning in this discussion: Arch, CachyOS, Clear Linux, Garuda, Gentoo, Nobara and PikaOS.