The irony is that “it just works” is often more true for Arch than for other distros because it has up-to-date drivers for everything.

Try to get a Radeon 7900XT working on Ubuntu 22.04 for example. It’s possible, but you’ll be jumping through much more hoops than on Arch.

Since Manjaro is forked from Arch, it would benefit from Arch’s updated drivers, right?

Manjaro is amazing if you don’t want to bullshit through the hassle of what the Arch installer has become. I understand the point of it is to get you more familiar with the linux system in general, but they had an installer and they ripped it out. Manjaro is basically just pre-configured Arch, so yeah. Despite all the purists “Manjaro isn’t arch!!”…in practice, it basically is.

Manjaro holds back Arch packages for futher testing, but they don’t hold back AUR packages (which would be a nightmare to be fair). I haven’t used Arch or Manjaro in several years, but I do remember Manjaro being a lot less stable after installing/using a lot of AUR packages due to dependency issues.

Not saying Manjaro is bad, but it’s a downside that separates it from Arch and shows it’s more than just a pre-configured Arch.