Turning on laptop goes through Manjaro boot settings screen twice for no reason

You don’t necessarily have to install everything on ext4, but if you do, then I recommend creating at least a separate partition for /home, and if you have less than 16 GiB of RAM, then make sure to also create a swap partition of roughly 150% the size of your RAM.

Also, you will still have issues with plymouth — especially if you have an Nvidia GPU — so I recommend uninstalling that.