Well, as you noticed a lot has changed since Debian in the 90s. While Manjaro has a lot of problems, and while I’ve found I need to reinstall it every 6 months or so because I’m not very l33t, it’s still honestly very easy and very straightforward, and definitely better than Arch if you don’t know what you’re doing.

If you approach Manjaro with a plan for regularly backing up your data, you can reinstall it with ease whenever you need to, and the reinstallation will be fast and easy. It works out of the box with Steam, and it doesn’t ask you to pay close attention to it’s backend while not having the problems you noticed with Ubuntu, and best of all it’s free and it’s not Windows. I run Manjaro and I’m pretty happy with it overall, when though I’m sure I’d be better served with Arch if I ever took the time to really figure it out properly. Good luck, I hope whatever you pick works out well for you.

What distribution did you try to use? Some of them are steeper to learn than others.