Archbang, Archlabs or Manjaro?
I am interested in using i3 as my wm. And because I will install it in my daily driver laptop, I want it to be reasonably stable and not with breaking updates.
Any thoughts and / or recommendations?

PPPUUUURRREE ARCH !!!!!

Ok no, just joking, I must be sadomasochistic to like the pain of installing all those drivers and stuff, but after it’s kind of okay if you download the right things

Manjaro it is!

Manjaro!

Manjaro works well for me at this point. Certainly less chance that it will suddenly break. It has a package group for i3wm so I think it should be easy enough to get started. I used Manjaro architect to install it, it was a breeze.

@SISheogorath Yes I agree with and know most of the stuff you are talking about, but when I am talking about stability, I mean it the "Manjaro" way, like what you said, having the option to back out from bleeding edge updates and install tested software. I am a Linux user for the past 6 years, so I know stuff breaks, but I also know how to fix a lot of that. I have no problem with that happening once in a while (like once every two months or less often). But I am not willing to spend more time that that fixing my os installation.

@mzeffect Thanks for the info. I have already seen that there is a i3wm package group available and your recommendation to use Manjaro architect is very appreciated. It may make my life easier!

@No-one I have heard good things from coworkers using it. However I am not a big fun of Cinnamon, Gnome 3 or KDE. But I can see there is an openbox option, which makes it appealing.

@No-one I really like Budgie, XFCE, openbox and I'd like to try i3wm. I found out about it recently and it seems really promising for productivity, especially if you are like me and spend a lot of time programming and in terminal.
I have not yet try Deepin, but I am going to.

I have a small rant about my arch story actually.

I used Manjaro for a while lately and had no real breaking updates (Maybe once every 3 months). If something broke it was annoying but not hard to fix. I like the Manjaro way as a kind of compromise.

Due to security and stability concerns I switched to fedora recently.

@justwellbrock Fedora is also a very nice alternative. I have used it extensively in the past ( I like SELinux) and I have read it has become a lot better and also comes with wayland instead of xorg, which is interesting on its own.

@DenRand I also like SELinux and had little problems so far. Wayland is also interesting but until now I didn't notice much of a difference to xorg except that one niche application does not support it.

What I like about SELinux is the fine control and the feeling of security it gives me.

I also really like the fedora community and way of e.g. reporting error messages right from the desktop. The contribution architecture is well structured.