I've installed Arch before. I can't claim I've ever really used it as a daily driver — going through the installation is something of a rite of passage in the Linux world, and I've done it, but I've never committed to it long-term for everyday use.
The Arch-based distro I actually used for an extended period was Manjaro. Manjaro takes the Arch base and makes it more approachable — it ships with a graphical installer, handles driver configuration more automatically, and gives you access to the AUR without having to set everything up yourself. That's genuinely useful. The problem is that Manjaro has a reputation for being breakable, and in my experience that reputation is earned. Holding back packages from Arch's rolling release and then pushing them in batches creates a different kind of instability than you'd expect — not the instability of always running bleeding-edge, but the instability of timing mismatches and delayed dependency updates. Several people I know have had similar experiences with it. It's a fine distribution for getting into the Arch ecosystem, but it's not one I'd trust with a machine I rely on.
Arch proper, installed and maintained correctly, is a different story — genuinely stable for people who know what they're doing. It's just not where I've ended up. For daily use I'm on Fedora KDE. If I need something I know will work reliably without drama on uncertain hardware, I install Linux Mint.
Desktop environment preferences: I like XFCE a lot — it's lightweight, fast, and does exactly what you ask without getting in the way. I preferred Ubuntu when it used the Unity desktop; the current GNOME setup has never clicked with me. GNOME is fine, I just don't enjoy using it. Hyprland and tiling window managers in general are not for me — I understand the appeal and I've tried them, but I don't want to manage a window manager as a hobby. KDE Plasma on Fedora is where I've landed, and it's the setup I've enjoyed the most by a significant margin.