So I’ll transition next month to Linux because I need stronger work station and my 2019 MacBook Pro is not enough. I’m preparing myself, I live mostly in cmd anyway but I’m on the fence if I should choose Manjaro or Ubuntu. I’m okay with spending some amount of time to learn and configure my environment properly. Can anyone tell me what l, as a programmer working with containers and mostly JS tooling, should consider in my decision?

I am a Manjaro user currently but have used other distros in the past, including Ubuntu. Given that, I would obviously recommend Manjaro. There are a million reasons but, for development, I find the rolling release model far superior. On Ubuntu, especially an LTS release, you are going to find over time that the software versions on your machine are too old. This will lead to installing from source or Flatpak or what have you and then your system is a mess. Worse, it also means that when you eventually move to a newer Ubuntu release, things are likely to break ( more likely at least ). Manjaro means more software updates more frequently and more hassle keeping software at older or stable versions but always up-to-date software and no big system upgrade ever again. For developers, I find the Manjaro model superior.

I also highly recommend looking into Distrobox.

https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox

Distrobox is Docker but instead of heavy sandboxing, when you are in the container you can see your real home directory, your real device tree, your real process list, and your real Wayland server ( desktop GUI ). This means you can Distrobox into an Ubuntu 20.04 LTS terminal for example and be able to run any software available Ubuntu ( including graphical ) with an experience very much like Ubuntu is installed directly on your machine. Best of both worlds. Distrobox uses Docker though so you are not going to want to run containers in Distrobox. So the real distro still matters.