Of course you can install them, but you need to do it. I didn’t say that it would be complicated or not possible, I just said that I really appreciated Manjaro for shipping the nvidia proprietary driver directly at the start without any trouble. And I did not say that I chose Arch-based for the nvidia driver, but for the more up-to-date drivers.

I don’t like Cinnamon but want to use KDE, but the user friendliness of LMDE would be really nice, not that i wouldn’t like the terminal.

It’s definetly GuhNome :P

My main conflict point with Arch is the maintenance factor. Whilst my priorities have been the bleeding edge for a long time, by now my thinking has been shifting more towards stability and being able to just use it. That’s what I loved about openSUSE Slowroll, but I don’t want to have a company behind it. And it had a KPM version mismatch resulting in broken nvidia driver.

I was avoiding the AUR as well, and I would definetly do so again. Even though I would probably stick with a plain Arch install instead of CachyOS

I did enjoy debian a lot when I used it, I then left it for hyprland and the rolling release though. But debian is definitely something up top of my list right now. Especially because I am now back to KDE Plasma and I’m not planning to change anything about that soon. The only picky point was that it does not support BTRFS with custom subvolumes for timeshift out of the box. But the stability would be a blessing.

I would go with fedora, but I don’t want a company behind my distro.

I love Plasma, habe been using it for almost 2 years and don’t want to change.

There have been bloated “easy to use” distros for a long time. But the based Linux distros like Arch & Debian have stayed pretty much untouched in my opinion. And, even tough I’m using plain Arch now, I also started into Linux using EndevourOS. It’s just more convenient and not too big of a hurdle to get into the Linux universe.

That’s not an argument for me, because less RAM usage by the operating system leaves you with more resources left for your applications and programms.