Some include openSUSE Tumbleweed, Solus and EndeavourOS. Not a really good look for some 'beginner friendly' distro now, isn't it? In the end it's up to you what distro you want, but Manjaro in my opinion just has a lot of problems, and there are a lot better rolling release distros around if you want to go that path. And of course, the time when one of the Manjaro top guys suddenly made an announcement blaming the users for any and all situations where Manjaro breaks.

Then, there's also the treasurer drama from last year when the Manjaro leader kicked the team's treasurer for literally doing his job(leader wanted to buy a 2,000EUR laptop with Manjaro funds, the treasurer asked about it and proceeded to get kicked), and then proceeded to aggressively censor the Manjaro forums. The Manjaro dev team doesn't really have a good track record such as forgetting to renew their SSL certificates twice. You want my advice, absolutely avoid Manjaro. The latest release of Ubuntu for example is still on GNOME 3.38. Fedora is also a distro that tries to adopt new technologies, such as the GNOME 40 desktop environment. Fedora puts out new releases every 6 months if I'm not wrong, very similar to how the Ubuntu non-LTS(long term support) releases work. It's not exactly a difficult distro, and Fedora is a distro that is both up to date and stable, but it isn't a rolling release. For your needs, you might want to look into Fedora once you get familiar with Linux.

Most of the complaints you hear are from years ago and irrelevant nowadays, they absolutely won't affect you. Ubuntu may seem like it has a bad reputation for you by chance, but it's definitely a good and reliable distro that allows you to get your stuff done without much hassle. As you spend time on Ubuntu, you'll figure out what it is that you want from Linux and then you'll be able to pick a distro accordingly. New to Linux? Definitely go with Ubuntu if you're not sure what distro to go with.

Ubuntu for mac from cd