I think it sometimes depends. If you're doing a lot of stuff with your system, the rolling release schedule means you get fixes faster, and Arch's documentation is pretty good for a lot of other stuff. Manjaro is more likely to "just work" with things, because it has newer drivers.
On the other hand, Ubuntu is pretty stable as long as you stick with what it provides and you're not going too far off the beaten path. Ubuntu feels very consistent to me, it just also feels a lot more stubborn, and I find myself fighting with it more whenever I plug in devices or configure it in a non-obvious way.
I think I just misjudged what side of that divide my nieces would be on. Small stuff like, I got them a drawing tablet and on Manjaro, it plugs in and the Gnome settings detect it, and the config is all graphical. Ubuntu has the same Gnome settings and the tablet works, but the settings don't detect the tablet at all, so to get buttons configured and left-handed mode working I needed to wire up xsetwacom and use dbus to detect when the tablet was plugged in. And that was made harder by the fact that there wasn't a lot of Ubuntu documentation for how that stuff worked, I basically used the Arch documentation and mentally translated some of the commands for Ubuntu.
But I think that's dependent on the person and what their needs are. If I had bought a more mainstream tablet for them, maybe they wouldn't have had that problem. My regret with Ubuntu is that I didn't realize how often I would want to be able to get things like a more recent kernel without compiling it myself. Ubuntu seems a lot more obtuse to me when it does break.
Everything is relative, they're both still Linux under the hood, and both are less likely than Windows to randomly break imo. I've gotten support calls from Windows family members about drivers just randomly not working one day because something updated behind the scenes without their input and started conflicting, about buying external displays that just don't get detected at all, and I don't even know how to start debugging issues like that. Even with Ubuntu, I don't really get that many support calls, mostly the computers just work.
On the other hand, Ubuntu is pretty stable as long as you stick with what it provides and you're not going too far off the beaten path. Ubuntu feels very consistent to me, it just also feels a lot more stubborn, and I find myself fighting with it more whenever I plug in devices or configure it in a non-obvious way.
I think I just misjudged what side of that divide my nieces would be on. Small stuff like, I got them a drawing tablet and on Manjaro, it plugs in and the Gnome settings detect it, and the config is all graphical. Ubuntu has the same Gnome settings and the tablet works, but the settings don't detect the tablet at all, so to get buttons configured and left-handed mode working I needed to wire up xsetwacom and use dbus to detect when the tablet was plugged in. And that was made harder by the fact that there wasn't a lot of Ubuntu documentation for how that stuff worked, I basically used the Arch documentation and mentally translated some of the commands for Ubuntu.
But I think that's dependent on the person and what their needs are. If I had bought a more mainstream tablet for them, maybe they wouldn't have had that problem. My regret with Ubuntu is that I didn't realize how often I would want to be able to get things like a more recent kernel without compiling it myself. Ubuntu seems a lot more obtuse to me when it does break.
Everything is relative, they're both still Linux under the hood, and both are less likely than Windows to randomly break imo. I've gotten support calls from Windows family members about drivers just randomly not working one day because something updated behind the scenes without their input and started conflicting, about buying external displays that just don't get detected at all, and I don't even know how to start debugging issues like that. Even with Ubuntu, I don't really get that many support calls, mostly the computers just work.