Maybe keep the distro wars out of a thread where people are barely able to accept that daily driving Linux is an option.

Anecdotally, recently I tried to upgrade/update a PC (at my parent's house) running a 5 YO Manjaro build and was not possible. All mirrors dead, GPG keys server dead, broken dependencies, etc... I am far from a Linux expert but tried everything I could, sometimes checking 10 YO threads and ChatGPT. In the end I just installed Windows O o.

if you actually care about bloat, by far the best* thing to do is set up arch linux manually (no archinstall script) and just install the packages you actually need. it's insane how little it actually takes to get a working system.

it's a bunch of effort though, both to learn how everything works and to set up all the things you're usually just used to being there by default. but once it's done you'll be able to fix any issue that pops up, because you actually KNOW what's on your system, as opposed to it being a massive collection of things you have no idea about.

*something like gentoo might be better but... compiling a browser takes ages and i recommend having an up to date browser, so you'll spend tons of time on that.

>Pop OS is very bloated. If you're looking for something on the lean side, check out Manjaro.

There are 100 distros, each with pros and cons, many far lighter than Manjaro.