Ahmad's recipe for the best Linux distro experience yet.

distronotes

This gist documents some of tweaks I have done to my install of Manjaro KDE on my ROG Strix and which in turned to be by far the best desktop experience I have had on Linux.
Just joting them down for my future reference.

* Distro: Manjaro 
  Reason: Superstable, has the latest software mostly, is minimal by design (love for ArchLinux!) and packaging is both insanely fast and simple.
          Plus AUR makes maintaining my personal custom packages super easy !
         
* DE: KDE plasma
  Reason: Amazingly pleasant to the eyes, highly customizable and incredibly fast. 
          Kwin-lowlatency is the closest you can get to an amazing supersmooth, lightweight, eye-candyful desktop experience that you can have on Linux today.          
  * Tweaks: 
    * Kwin-lowlatency: Kwin-lowlatency makes the experience butter smooth. (its in AUR)
      Links:
        https://github.com/tildearrow/kwin-lowlatency
        https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=KDE-KWin-Low-Latency
    
* Kernel: Linux-ck from AUR
  Reason: Linux-ck increases responsivenesss which I need from a personal laptop. 
  * More tweaks:
    Disable intel_pstate and use schedutil instead. I personally found that intel_pstate is somewhat slow at scaling up the frequencies and holds back the experience/responsive of a machine.
    Therefore add intel_pstate=disable in /etc/default/grub's GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT and run update-grub.    
  
* Fontconfig/Freetype2: Fontconfig-infinality had incredible patches for subpixel font rendering on Linux. I do not require them anylonger as the upstreams are just as good.

* Firefox:
  Reason: I switched from Chromium to Firefox recently for the below reasons:
          a) Very tweakable. Just run through the ArchLinux's wiki's and you will see how customizable it is.
          b) It does HW video acceleration on Linux unlike Chromium.
          c) Install ublock-origin and other plugins and in newer firefox you can hide the titlebar now. (so it is just like chrome)
          
  * Tweaks:
    The following tweaks should make Firefox butter-smooth on the Linux install for you,
    * Improve scrolling : https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/firefox#Smooth_Scrolling
    * Cache always in Memory: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Firefox/Profile_on_RAM (I have only done cache to memory bits yet)
    * If your display has >60HZ refresh rate, ensure firefox knows about it: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/firefox#Frame_rate
    * For a HiDPi display set the appropriate DPI in firefox: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Firefox/Tweaks#Configure_the_DPI_value

* Other tweaks: 
    * Increase battery backup (Enabling powersaving on PCIe express bus can disable the secondary GPU, which is a win if BBswitch doesn't work for you. Have your selective toggles run through powertop on startup.)
    * Create a fstrim timer/service to trim your SSDs on machine bootup. Look at https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Solid_state_drive#Periodic_TRIM
    * I ensure that the framebuffer set by my UEFI is reused by the intel gpu. This speeds up the bootup and feels snappy too. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Intel_graphics#Fastboot
    * I set the Tearfree options for the intel driver as described here : https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Intel_graphics#Tearing