If done right this could be a baby step towards Qubes, https://www.qubes-os.org/

Arch has pacman, which I found about as good as the ubuntu repos, but it also has AUR, which has damned near everything. Unfortunately, arch is also almost willfully hard to use. They only recently got an 'installer' and it's a shell script that's worse than the slackware installer I first used back in '99. There isn't very good tooling to tweak settings for anything, you're referred to the arch wiki, that, while good, could really use a technical writer. Finally, I strongly get the sense that it's a 'toy' distro meant for exploring than a production distro meant for prod use. Granted, this is mainly from my experience where updates failed spectacularly (twice!), and the devs responsible basically shrugged and blamed upstream, when they were making grub builds straight from master for their 'stable' repos. Their 'fix' took a whole week, and was basically adding some patch notes advising people to run a command before rebooting.

Pop OS is basically the latest ubuntu LTS with a few tweaks to gnome, a scheduler which gives higher priority to foreground tasks, and installs most major packages from deb repos instead of snaps (though flatpacks are still available. If not for pop i would have simply went with linux mint.

1. No upgrade path between lts... You're on your own 2. On 20.04, no working Wayland, Bluetooth issues even with pw, 3. In general, PPAs don't come close to aur in terms of availability of sw

I was going to switch to arch, but after the grub issue noted in other comments here, went with manjaro since this is also my work machine

Manjaro has its own, different set of issues, but I've yet to hit any of them

For real, advising someone to use Manjaro over Arch is kinda weird.

Before that I tried rEFInd, wrote a small lean config file and while I could boot, I had some UI issues. Seemed buggy but it might have been my fault.