I installed Manjaro xfce recently and have been extremely impressed by how easy so many things are. I had been using gnome before that, Mac before that, and yet earlier Microsoft had not added telemetry so I used windows
Xfce is at the "light but jank" end of the pool. Try changing your password via Settings: you can't. Thunar, its file manager, is extremely basic. Dolphin, KDE's file manager, is even better than Windows's Explorer (you have split directory views, way more options, terminal integration, etc.), which always amazed me. How is this free GUI product made by a handful of volunteers exceed the thing this megacorporation has offered for decades?! Meanwhile, Gnome's file manager mimics Xfce's in basicness, and on top of that you can't use Dropbox or any other tray apps cuz kek B o l d D e s i g n(TM)(R).
I like manjaros package management GUI, file manager (for the tree view), and generally good defaults for things (drop down terminal without needing to install guake)
Plasma definitely looks nicer and has better animations.
I generally avoid "niche", satellite distros/software because, well, you can't expect them to work as well as the their major competitors. Cinnamon IS a major DE and a stylistic competitor to KDE and Xfce, and it's quite nice too (but not offered as a Manjaro flavor, sadly).
>I'm fairly happy with i3, until I need to plug in additional screens...
I've never been brave or OPEN-MINDED enough to try those kinds of DEs... I welcome reinforcement of my biases; w-...what happens when you plug an additional screen in? :v
Absolutely nothing. I have to tyoe xrandr commands to make anything happen. I3 is strictly just a window manager. Unfortunately projects like Gnome solve these problems in a completely monolithic fashion, with no module or component that I use that just solves this problem.
As a Novell shop I figured I'd give their desktop distro (effectively a customised SuSE from memory) a run a couple of times, and it used KDE. I seem to recall it was nicer than Gnome I'd used under RH a few years prior as a student, but felt much heavier on resource usage?