how was your Ubuntu experience? Because i always felt like it could break any time: all this PPAs, need to compile lots of stuff yourself and the release model in general haven’t quite worked for me.

I could recommend you to try EndeavourOS if you had somewhat similar problems. It works like a charm, since its an Arch derivative but without Manjaro’s problems, which means it has rolling release model, so you always get the latest version pacages, and it has AUR support, which means you won’t ever need to clone and compile anything from github, as there’s 99% chance it already has its AUR, so all it takes is to type “yay -S *package name*”. Not to mention the comprehensive ArchWiki. It also has an i3 flavor. I fucking love i3.