I am a Linux noobie and have only used Mint for around six months now. While I have definitely learned a lot, I don’t have the time to always be doing crazy power user stuff and just want something that works out of the box. While I love Mint, I want to try out other decently easy to use distros as well, specifically not based on Ubuntu, so no Pop OS. Is Manjaro a possibly good distro for me to check out?
TBH, if you don’t have bleeding edge hardware just stay with OPENSUSE Leap, Debian Stable, Linux Mint or LMDE. If you are feeling adventurous, even Slackware will cover your back most of the time and gives you more bragging rights than Arch. Even if you have bleeding edge hardware, you are better off with OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, Fedora and Arch.
Manjaro is just not that stable. It once was the only way to install an Arch-ish system without having to go through the hassle of the official Arch installation guide, but currently there are several options to avoid this guide and still have a vanilla Arch system. That’s how I used Manjaro for a brief period. The tools I remember they provide, or even better alternatives, are in the Arch User Repo (AUR) anyway, available for all Arch-like distro users. Maybe the only exception to this is the wide catalog of kernels that Manjaro provides, but an equally extensive catalog is available for Arch users through official and third-party repos and the AUR.
Manjaro is not quite exciting but also not quite stable. I think it’s a distro most people get by accident.
Debian unstable best for gaming
Debian sid/unstable isn’t even a real distro, it is just a staging area for testing. No care is taken to keep packages added to it compatible, that is literally where packages go to achieve that compatibility before they go to Debian testing and/or stable. It does not get security updates either.
You don’t need security updates when you are using the latest version of a package. That’s the security model that all rolling release distros use. Security comes from upstream development, from devs patching their software as soon as they find vulnerabilities. If this is more or less secure than the Debian Stable approach is up for your use case.
Packages with fixes are often in Debian Security before they are in unstable though because nobody cares about security fixes for unstable. They just update the packages there when they need a new version as part of their regular workflow. It is not like a rolling release distro.
I didn’t say it was a rolling release distro. The security model of their packages is one of a rolling release distro but the distribution is unstable, not rolling. The thing I find plainly absurd is to ask a security repo from the unstable branch of a distro, or from a rolling release distro.
I don’t know about security updates, but what you just described in the first sentences is literally the definition of an unstable release
No, unstable just means it isn’t tested, not that people literally do not pay attention to version constraints when assembling a collection of packages.