This might not help, but I’d seriously recommend reconsidering Arch derivatives.
I’ve been 100% Linux for almost 2 years now, with Garuda Linux on my primary desktop and Fedora on my laptop. I’ve had zero major issues with Garuda (and very few minor ones, to the point I can’t think of any specific problems in the moment), gaming performance has been fantastic, and the availability of software in the AUR is nothing short of amazing.
In my experience, keeping up with updates is not at all an impediment to use, and I’ve yet to have stability issues of any kind. I’ve been seriously considering replacing Fedora with Garuda on my laptop, the experience has been so smooth.
Just stay away from Manjaro. I feel like Arch fan-boys being dicks and people recommending Manjaro to new Linux converts are the only two problems with Arch (or at least its derivite distros, I haven’t raw dogged vanilla Arch before).
Sounds about like I would expect. I do feel like a lot of the “Core” distros are similar though, although not to the same degree. You get more “out of the box” from something like Mint or PopOS than you do straight Debian, for example.
The derivative distros i’ve tried come with a lot of help getting things setup just how you want/need, a lot of it GUI based which is nice for new converts.