I’ll throw in my vote for Manjaro because while it’s not perfect, it hits all of OP’s points nicely.
- arch based
- hard to break (but not impossible)
- biased a little towards Gnome but runs KDE and XFCE great too
- uses a curated rolling release
The last point is the most important. Rolling release means it updates regularly, so your packages will be mostly up to date. Curated means they do testing in an unstable repository. If an update breaks something, those changes aren’t pushed to stable.
I ended up with it after trying other distros but having trouble with my nVidia card. Manjaro’s MHWD tool installed their drivers easily (although slightly confusing with its unnecessary checkboxes) and more recently, I’ve upgraded to AMD and never had a single issue.
It’s not perfect but almost every issue I’ve had was located between the keyboard and the chair.
There isn’t anything you need to know. It’s the opposite actually. You can now forget about graphics drivers entirely if you want. Unless it’s like, a job or hobby or something.