Especially (but not only) because of the (now fixed) problem with pamac, where using certain third-party repositories like mesa-nonfree led to a lockup (my post on this problem was mentioned as off-topic here!), I cloned (not deleted) my Manjaro installation and converted the clone to Arch. So, among other things I no longer need mesa-nonfree-repo because arch has not disabled accelerated hardware decoding in mesa, yet. - But thats not my point, here.
After same testing my new system i found out that any problems described here several times regarding mounting NTFS filesystems with kernel 6.8 does not exist in Archlinux.
Both, a normal NTFS-partition mounted with fstab and also some older veracrypt-containerfiles formatted with NTFS can be mounted/opened without any problem with the current Archlinux kernel (6.8.2-arch2-1). In Manjaro this was only possible up to kernel 6.7.
With manjaro-kernel 6.8 (6.8.2-1-MANJARO) for NTFS-partition (fstab)
UUID=01D590002XXXXXX /home/XXXXX/.mnt/Sys_Progs ntfs iocharset=utf8,uid=1000,gid=100,umask=000,nofail 0 0
i get:
Mär 31 20:28:59 Peterputer systemd[1]: home-XXXXX-.mnt-Sys_Progs.mount: Failed with result 'exit-code'.
Mär 31 20:28:59 Peterputer systemd[1]: Failed to mount /home/XXXXX/.mnt/Sys_Progs.
Mär 31 20:28:59 Peterputer kernel: /dev/sda3: Can't open blockdev
and for a veracrypt-containerfile formatted with NTFS (tried to open with veracrypt):
fuse: mount failed: Das Gerät oder die Ressource ist belegt
Mär 31 20:36:50 Peterputer kernel: /dev/mapper/veracrypt1: Can't open blockdev
Mär 31 20:36:50 Peterputer kernel: /dev/mapper/veracrypt1: Can't open blockdev