No opinions here.

The work I do restricts me to distros with wide third-party software support.

Can't be jumping to the "latest and greatest" as it always means "old shit won't work."

I used Artix a while back. It's easy to install and use but it doesn't come with a software manager out of the box (unless you have KDE which has Discover I guess). Also it makes you more gigachad than using normal Arch.

Someone forked arch linux to rip out systemd and put old fashioned initd back in place?

The FAQ and the whiny rant it links to makes look more like they are part of a cult that worships unix as it was 20 years ago.

I brought it up in a VM a few months ago, still play with it occasionally. Installed the xfce-openrc iso, no issues during installation. pacman was new to me, previous experience is with dnf/rpm and apt/dpkg.

Installed yay right away so I could use it to install brave and librewolf. Cloned the git repo, aur.archlinux.org/yay.git, cd to yay, "makepkg -si" as regular user. (Not interested at this time to learn the intricacies of the AUR.)

yay install brave-bin yay install librewolf-bin

It's the quickest of my X based VMs to boot to login screen.

Sticking with MX for {lap,desk}tops, and antiX for servers due to stability.