The main thing I disliked about ubuntu was the lack of availability of recent software, and the packaging of software in snaps. Used to be, deb packages was the 'lingua franca' of the internet. Everyone offered deb files, often provided by PPAs. These days you're much more likely to find a package in pacman / aur as ubuntu has gotten a little less popular amongst the folks who like playing with the bleeding edge.
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.