I also prefer Manjaro but I had to give up on it on Apollo Lake because it kept freezing randomly even with several latest kernels.
Oh, surprising! I even recommended an "Apollo Lake" Intel N3450 based mini-PC to a person. I myself still have Celeron N3000 in my main computer, ASRock Beebox. It is the earlier Braswell generation. No problems with Manjaro.
I could imagine a new kernel coming with rolling Manjaro would work better on a new CPU.
Linux Mint with backported kernel and Debian testing worked very well, but I gave up on Debian testing because it strangely didn't have Kodi, and building from source had too many problems.
Surprising again. A web search tells you can install it from:
http://www.deb-multimedia.org/although I didn't test it myself.
So I ended up with Debian stable, although it was awful out of the box until 4.12 was installed.
You mean the older Linux kernels lacked some HW drivers? Otherwise the differences between kernels in a desktop system are difficult to notice.
I looked at Sparky but couldn't find anything worth using it over Debian, so I wonder what did you see in it that I missed? Maybe that would be worth another look?
Good question. The main difference was that Sparky is rolling and Debian is not.
According to web it should be possible to use Debian testing as a rolling distro and even their documentation hints that way.
However when I changed "buster" to "testing" in /etc/apt/sources.list, I could not update any more.
I asked about it in Debian-user mailing list but didn't get a proper answer which is surprising again...
http://debian.2.n7.nabble.com/Editing-etc-apt-sources-list-breaks-update-td4191020.htmlThe most on-topic answer was that using "buster" is OK because it will be the same as "testing" for maybe 2 years. The answer was from "Fungi4All" who was banned from the whole mailing list few days later for writing off-topic posts (not for me but for some other threads). For some reason he wrote me a personal mail saying he moves to Devuan and Artix.
So, my impression of Debian-user list is not good.
Anyway, for your use case Debian may be as good as Sparky.
My original search was for a rolling distro that can be installed on a x86 machine from a CD.
Such distros are going extinct although the machines are still very usable.
Many distros, including Manjaro, Ubuntu and Mint have dropped or are just dropping support for x86.
Debian still supports x86 and a CD-size image and has a good installer. Otherwise I would prefer a more modern distro.