Earlier quoted context omitted.
I also switched to arch for a bit, but then I was left with an unbootable system after the arch devs shipped grub's master branch as stable. The arch devs were completely unapologetic and told me 'well maybe you shouldn't use arch if you can't recover a system who won't boot' Immediately formatted and switched to pop OS and I've never been happier.
Gnome keeps me off of pop. I look forward to the popos team are ready to ship cosmic as the default desktop. Have you tried OpenSuse Tumbleweed or Gecko Linux? Tumbleweed is a rolling distro but the maintainers apparently test all of the updates they push. OpenSuse can feel a but clunky (it asks for passwords for “everything” for instance), but theres Gecko, which acts a bit as a wrapper of a distro to make OpenSuse…
I've heard good things about tumbleweed and it even has support for WSL, so I might try that if I ever build a gaming pc and have to main windows.