Crazy how much more of the world is closer to Georgia than Georgia

Yes.

You’ll just boot up into a blank home folder and a completely uncustomized bash (or whatever your default shell is).

After mounting you’ll have to restart your shell or source your .${SHELL}rc

I’ve distro-hopped quite a bit. I used Manjaro for about 4-5 months. I really liked it actually. I did end up having some problems after an update, and even with some community help, I wasn’t able to fix it. After that, I decided to try Arch and ended up loving and using it for the past 5 or so years.

If you’re new to Linux and insist on using an Arch based distro, Manjaro is probably a good choice for you, but if you have used Linux for a while and are comfortable with system configuration, I really couldn’t recommend Arch enough.

Both communities are very well established and responsive, but Arch is on its own level. The Arch wiki is really an amazing thing, and aside from some gatekeepers, the majority of the Arch community is happy to help.

I know you said that you don’t want to be doing “crazy power user stuff” all the time, but really once you get everything set up the way you like it (it took me maybe 2-3 hours after installation), you can basically leave configuration and use it just like Manjaro and have – in my experience – a more stable system.

Up to you, but you seem like you might be comfortable in Linux already, so I’d recommend just going for Arch.