I’m using a pc connected to my TV for my daily media needs. Currently it has nixos with xfce, which I like because it’s (as far as I can tell as a linux noob) fairly minimal and snappy. However the nix tools can be a bit slow sometimes and it’s annoying to maintain, so I was thinking of installing manjaro xfce. Are there any performance tradeoffs I should be aware of when using manjaro xfce, compared to a fairly vanilla distro and vanilla xfce? Or am I even better off using a different version of manjaro/arch? I’m asking because I use manjaro xfce on my laptop, and it looks quite slick, so I’m worried it might be slower on an older pc (my day-to-day laptop is somewhat beefy for a laptop).
Also, in case it does to matter, is it possible to make manjaro xfce as vanilla as possible in terms of visual settings? Since I primarily use the tv pc for streaming I don’t mind if its very ugly but I do want it to be hands-off maintenance wise (which in my experience is the sweet spot that manjaro hits).
LXDE has an even lower footprint than XfCE and as you didn’t specify any specs, that’s what I would recommend: just try it out in dual boot with your existing system and then wipe the other one if you’re satisfied.
Please also read the below and skip whatever you know already as Manjaro uses a rolling release model, so LTS kernels and kernel management becomes a thing!
You can install the minimal version of Manjaro XFCE (or your preferred DE), and later install the packages you would need. That would keep it “more vanilla”.
Manjaro XFCE runs quite fast on my 2009 computer with Pentium dual core processor an 3 GB memory.
. Just check on their forum and got the answer 
