I made a post a few days ago asking your opinion on Manjaro and it was very mixed, with a slightly negative overall opinion. I heard some recommend EndeavourOS instead and did some online research and it seems to be pretty solid and not have the repository problem that Manjaro has.
Just for context I am a Linux noob and have only used Mint for about the past six months. While I don’t have any major complaints, I am looking to explore more distros and the Arch repository with its rolling releases. I am not a huge fan of how certain packages on apt are a few years old and outdated. However, I also don’t have the time to be always configuring my OS and just want something that works well out of the box.
Is EndeavourOS a solid choice?
I agree with everything you said other than I would advise against using pamac. It will cause fewer problems than on Manjaro ( as EOS uses the real Arch repos ) but it may still cause problems.
I didn’t even know pamac was a thing outside of manjaro, but yes ofc just use paru (or yay or sth), nowadays I rarely ever use pacman itself, but use paru for basically anything