I’ve been running Manjaro for the last 4 months and it’s been incredibly reliable and smooth. I haven’t done any serious tweaking beyond installing a realtime audio kernal. I run updates every few days and I haven’t had a single issue so far.
Edit: what’s up with the down voting? If there’s something incorrect with recommending Manjaro in this context, I’d love to know why, since I’m still relatively new to Linux.
They’re $11 on eBay.