Last time I tried Manjaro, the kernel was too old for my graphics card, so the graphical installer simply froze as soon as it loaded. I tried architect, but ran into some sort of dependency hell that – even though many others reported it and discussed solutions online – I could not resolve.
I gave up and installed Fedora. Fedora also froze, but only after logging in (after successfully installing). That let me ctrl + f2 => log in, sudo dnf update (updated to latest kernel), sudo reboot. Then everything has been pain free ever since.
Fedora might not be a rolling distro (and I’m not eager to switch to rawhide), but it’s on all the latest releases anyway, eg my computer is on gcc 8.1.1 and kernel 4.18.8 at the moment, so it satisfies that itch.
I installed Ubuntu with the same graphics card on another computer and didn’t run into any issues at all, even though Ubuntu has older kernels. I don’t know why/how.
Right now, Ubuntu 18.04 also has the advantage of being on gcc-7 (and libgfortran.so.4), which much of Julia currently assumes, but that might be an issue of the past.