I am running Fedora 28 with Cinnamon on my desktop. I have a Core2Duo laptop with Intel integrated graphics running Mint19 XFCE. I am quite happy with both.

I have Arch on my daily driver and pretty happy overall, mainly for the latest llvm+mesa versions, but in my laptop I have Debian Testing. I have been using Debian the longest, with other distro hopping here and there, and I reckon it's my fav distro.

I recently switched from arch+i3 to ubuntu+i3, and more games work out of the box. The ubuntu-desktop package is only installed because it pulls in a lot of nice things automatically, like wireless drivers and such.

Ubuntu really isn't too bad distro even if you want to do something weird. You can still have the root partition on btrfs on bcache backed by both ssd and harddrive if you know what you are doing. I doubt the installer support it though, so debootstrap is the way to do it. My laptop also use ubuntu and it has root partition on lvm on cryptsetup. The installer has or had some support for that, but it doesn't always work, so again, debootstrap can save the day.

I don't feel ubuntu restricts me any more than arch linux did, but I still use the arch wiki occasionally. I think ubuntu PPAs are much nicer than arch linux's AUR, and I wasn't able to use arch without using AUR.

Quoting: Ketil...I don't feel ubuntu restricts me any more than arch linux did, but I still use the arch wiki occasionally...

You can't use both Ubuntu and the Arch Wiki, that's cheating ;)

Hmm, found with openSUSE that it has less stock built applications then arch. DUnno what the creators of Antergos have done, but it feels bloated it loads slower then both vanilla arch and Manjaro.
Would reccomend manjaro over Antergos anyday. Debian still feels like it is in the stone age, again you will be scratching for distro created packages. Ubuntu is still pretty meh.

This is all from a AMD gpu users view point though for video drivers ive had the best compatability with minimal messing around with arch. From an app point of view, for the rolling distros I found arch to have the most in house built packages. You will find opensuse has a lot of community built repos just it has a ninfty web interface for it's version of AUR pretty much.

Ubuntu would probably be your goto if you don't use any odd ball apps and run a nvidia card. Well I would probably still reccomend arch. But I'm used to arch, most people don't like it becuase it's "complicated".

But as you have said yourve been using arch for 4+ years I would say stick with it, it is a solid platform and the AUR is probably one of the safest run user created repositories because you can look at how and what is being built in the PKGBUILD files.

As has been mentioned, you could take a look at Gentoo. It might be difficult to set up but you learn a lot, and when you have everything set up and configured to your tastes, it requires rather minimal maintenance. Just update the system every few weeks which on a modern machine takes a few hours at the most (compile time). I've been using Gentoo for 15 years now and am very happy with it, my current 'installation' is probably 10 years old by now.