I appreciate the fact that the distro community is diverse enough to accommodate even people whose personal preferences are this objectively wrong. ;)

With the number of atrocities that manjaro has committed, it should be crucified. https://manjarno.snorlax.sh

My personal list is short:

1. Debian (Testing) - evertything works OOTB. Great performance. Stable. Plenty of current packages. Works on my workstation, laptop, RPi.
2. FreeBSD ;) - if you really want an alternative.

Wait a minute. Since when are LXQt and XFCE "Distributions" ?

I don't even know what that vaguely gear-like one in the top tier is, or the one next to the geeko in the second tier are.

(Just as a sidenote, as one of the openSUSE LXQt maintainers, and sometimes LXQt Upstream contributor, if we're providing our own distro somewhere, this is the first I've heard of it.)

PopOS is not too far off from a DeCanonicalled Ubuntu with extensions. It is little more than the Gnome extensions it contains, and the project could just as easily be just the pop-desktop package. They ship a year old desktop and it is rather unrefined.

Why's pop so low? I haven't used Linux for a while, but I recall liking it.