My DE broke because Manjaro added untested/beta patches from upstream, sometimes even against the developer’s word.

What DE? What patches? And isn’t Arch the upstream for Manjaro?

By design Manjaro holds back Arch packages, which means AUR package dependencies often do not match what is expected. This is not false.

The possibility that AUR dependencies may not be met is not false. What is false is the claim that it’s a common problem. The chances of it happening are tiny. If it did happen to you please mention what AUR package(s).

It’s very hard to argue with people who claim “it broke” but never give concrete examples of what broke. They make these outrageous claims and put the burden on you to prove them wrong. It’s either disingenuous or done by spiteful, clueless people who genuinely don’t know what they did wrong but then shouldn’t go around throwing mud.

And yes, Manjaro does hold kernels back because you have to specify when you want to move off a major release.

That’s a feature, not a bug. I’ve already explained that I dislike any distro that forces major kernel changes on me. Forcing people to switch major kernel versions is dumb and dangerous. That’s high maintenance for me, waking up one day to find out I’m on a different kernel and that shit doesn’t work.

everything Manjaro wishes it was - a thin, user-friendly wrapper around Arch.

That is not what Manjaro is nor wishes to be. It’s a derivate distro with its own goals and I find it unbelievable how much some people can hate that. It’s not the first distro in history that’s downstream of another, Debian has dozens of distros using it as a base and you don’t see this kind of extreme reactions. I’m baffled by it.

Manjaro’s official response to them forgetting to update their SSL certs was to roll back your clock, putting everyone at risk of accepting invalid certs in the process.

Ah there’s the old chestnut. Thank God this irrelevant fact exists; what would people bring up otherwise when all else fails.