It sucks you had an experience like that with the community. There are elitists and then just big jerks. What communities often fail at is a groupthink issue where they have a solution to a problem that’s extraneous to most people, but they accept it as “well duh, RTFM”.

Their project’s goal seems to be the adoption of use, broad use and in turn contribution. The problem is their attitudes toward problems that still need to be resolved, and the release management combined with stability is a common problem in much more than just Endeavor’s community. You see the issue in Pop!, Nobara, Arch, and even Ubuntu. You even see this BIGTIME in Gnome and to a lesser degree KDE.

A Gnome developer will tell you that you should just use it their way, and not expect basic shit to work, where at least KDE puts it for consideration on their own end to fix or develop.

What I’m getting at in short though is the prevailing attitude of elitism being shitty. That being said, there are people who fall into the “time vampire” group of people who will get pointed toward a solution, but not have the capacity to intuit other basic functions and it pisses people off. Nobody deserves to be treated poorly, but the fine line is out there where it’s up to a user to figure their stuff out. From what you describe, updates breaking the user experience falls solidly on their package maintainers fucking their release schedule in the ass, then having an elitist attitude about how to fix it. They’d just as well keep on trucking and treat people poorly for stuff that their own teams broke, to which I respond, fuck those asshole motherfuckers.

Manjaro Gaming Edition was a community thing and has been abandoned for 5 years now. All Manjaro editions are listed on their website: https://manjaro.org/download/

I haven’t personally used it but Bazzite is a custom image based off of Fedora 39 with preinstalled gaming software and it’s atomic

To be honest, the default themes for many DE’s are actually pretty tasteful. Just vanilla Arch isn’t bad if you don’t mind running the pacman update command. I honestly recommend Nobara for people who want stability and point/click updates.

Endeavor is more like hobbyist UI purist, and not that well optimized. Arch is insanely optimized, as well as Nobara. I would recommend Ubuntu but, Snaps. Pop would be great if their major rebase was further along, so options are pretty limited. We’re in a weird transition right now as far as the major distros and overall performance metrics.

I like Mint; it has that Ubuntu ease of use, without Ubuntu’s snap packages.

If you want something geared specifically for gaming, Pop_OS is good. I’m not a fan of how it looks, but I think I’m the minority in that

Opensuse tumbleweed because at least they test software before pushing to users.

Manjaro ran without breaking for me for almost two years. EOS also nuked itself after a few months for me. I think Manjaro’s reputation is worse than the actual distro because a lot of people circlejerked about their failed cert issue (which affected only the website) and the “scandal” about the laptop thingy some years ago.

Skip the bullshit and go straight to Arch. archinstall for a good time.