This. I still daily drive arch, and, even though I’ve rarely had any breaking updates, it’s always feels like a gamble. Have to keep a mental note of which critical packages are being updated, just in case I have to rollback the package. Always carrying an install medium with an arch iso when taking my laptop out.
Xfce for modularity and speed. Disable xfwm4 and xfdesktop and run i3 without i3bar.