That's just the choice Manjaro makes. Manjaro is based on Arch Linux. Arch is one of the most popular and widely-respected distributions, but it is a fairly "y

That's just the choice Manjaro makes. Manjaro is based on Arch Linux. Arch is one of the most popular and widely-respected distributions, but it is a fairly "you should know what you are doing, and do it yourself" kind of distributions. If you haven't done it before, you will have to read some docs and do a few web searches to get a new Arch machine spun up and configured. It's not hard, but it is not point-and-click, and you have to make some choices yourself. Manjaro adds a GUI installer and a "everything is set up for you by default after install" mentality, like Pop OS (or Zorin OS, or Elementary OS, etc). One of the things people love about Arch is the Arch User Repository (AUR). This is a community-maintained collection of software packages that work on Arch. It has a lot of software, and is well-maintained. Manjaro exposes the AUR in an easy-to-use GUI form, and makes it very easy to upgrade to very recent releases. Arch is a "rolling release" distribution, which means there are no big annual or semi-annual major updates, like Ubuntu 21.04, 21.10, etc. So with Manjaro you can easily stay closer to the latest versions of software packages. With Pop OS, since it is based on and trails Ubuntu, and the Ubuntu release cycle is semiannual major updates that tend to update a bunch of things at once, you might lag behind a little more. Note: I'm not an expert on this topic, so corrections welcome; this is just what I learned on a weekend recently while installing Ubuntu, Arch, Manjaro, and Pop OS to decide which one to go with as I moved to Linux from macOS. I chose Pop OS in the end, as I found it the most Mac-like. Coming from macOS, I thought it would be the easiest one to just get started with on Monday, doing my day job work which consists mainly of coding in VS Code, keeping some terminals open, and using Firefox, Brave, Chrome, and Slack and a few web apps. (I'm happy with Pop OS, but since my use case is basically "use the Linux PC as a generic work computer, that runs browsers and common apps on the latest hardware", probably any of the distributions I tried would have worked out well.)