This post started out as a note to keep track of the packages I installed in Arch Linux (BTW). Then I realised there’s no comprehensive guide on setting up Arch after getting a working GUI/DE. This post aims to fill that role. I won’t be including any installation instructions for Arch itself, as there’s a plethora of guides out there. If you’re using another distro, feel free to skip the Arch specific sections, only some of it is distro specific. Some of it might be preconfigured in your distro, like trackpad gestures and zRAM. I plan on keeping this post updated.

I’m using an Acer Aspire 7 A715-75G laptop which comes with an Intel i5 9300H, NVIDIA GTX 1650, 8GB RAM and 512GB nVME. For AMD-specific packages, check out the Arch Wiki. Only Intel and NVIDIA packages will be listed here.

Table of Contents

• Base Install
• GPU Drivers
  • Hardware Acceleration in Firefox
• Trackpad Gestures
• Theming
• Undervolting Intel CPUs
• zRAM
• Out-Of-Memory Killer
• CPU Frequency Scaling
• Runtime Power Management
• I/O Scheduler
• AUR Optimizations
• Conclusion

Base Install

The following packages will take care of the base system with Zen kernel, XFCE, LightDM, NetworkManager and Pipewire:

base base-devel linux-zen linux-zen-headers linux-firmware intel-ucode btrfs-progs efibootmgr git
sof-firmware pipewire pipewire-alsa pipewire-pulse pipewire-jack wireplumber pavucontrol
networkmanager network-manager-applet
xorg xfce4 xfce4-goodies lightdm lightdm-gtk-greeter lightdm-gtk-greeter-settings shared-mime-info-gnome noto-fonts noto-fonts-emoji noto-fonts-cjk

Feel free to replace components as per your preference.

I also install the following packages which you can check out:

gvfs-mtp nemo nemo-fileroller nemo-preview neovim firefox vlc stow tmux rate-mirrors fd fzf

For the bootloader, I prefer systemd-boot to GRUB. Set the following boot options regardless of the bootloader:

quiet splash audit=0 nowatchdog nmi_watchdog=0

Run the following snippet to install yay, a pacman wrapper with AUR support:

git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/yay-bin.git ~/yay-bin
cd ~/yay-bin
makepkg -si
cd ~
rm -rf ~/yay-bin

GPU Drivers

• Intel: mesa vulkan-intel intel-media-driver
• NVIDIA: nvidia-dkms libva-vdpau-driver-vp9-git
• Hybrid Graphics: All the above + optimus-manager optimus-manager-qt

Note: Uninstall xf86-video-vesa so that modesetting drivers are used for Intel.

By running optimus-manager-qt, you can choose between iGPU, dGPU, or hybrid mode. For more info, refer to the Optimus Manager Wiki.

Hardware Acceleration in Firefox

Set the following flags in about:config:

• media.ffmpeg.vaapi.enabled: true
• media.ffvpx.enabled: false
• media.navigator.mediadatadecoder_vpx_enabled: true
• media.rdd-vpx.enabled: false

Trackpad Gestures

Paste the following contents to /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/30-touchpad.conf:

Section "InputClass"
    Identifier "touchpad"
    Driver "libinput"
    MatchIsTouchpad "on"

    Option "Tapping" "on"
    Option "ClickMethod" "clickfinger"
    Option "NaturalScrolling" "true"
    Option "AccelProfile" "adaptive"
    Option "TappingButtonMap" "lrm"
EndSection

Theming

Packages: qt5ct kvantum-qt5

QT apps look bad out of the box with GTK DEs. To fix this, open kvantum-qt5 and set a theme. Now open qt5ct and set Style to kvantum and configure your fonts and icon themes.

I use the Qogir theme, which is a fork of the now unmaintained Arc theme.

Packages: qogir-gtk-theme-git kvantum-theme-qogir-git qogir-icon-theme

Undervolting Intel CPUs

NOTE: This only applies for 4th to 10th gen Intel CPUs. For AMD and older Intel CPUs, checkout the Undervolting CPU article in the Arch Wiki.

Packages: intel-undervolt stress glmark2

Undervolting means lowering the voltage that the CPU is using, as the stock voltage is almost always higher than what’s needed. Undervolting leads to a reduction in CPU temperatures, which then leads to less throttling, more performance, and a quieter machine. It also reduces battery consumption.

-100mV is a good place to start. Open /etc/intel-undervolt.conf and make these modifications:

undervolt 0 'CPU' -100
undervolt 1 'GPU' -100
undervolt 2 'CPU Cache' -100
undervolt 3 'System Agent' -100
undervolt 4 'Analog I/O' -100

Now run sudo intel-undervolt apply. You can confirm it by running sudo intel-undervolt read. sudo intel-undervolt measure gives you the current power consumption. To ensure system stability, run stress tests.

Run glmark2 & stress --cpu $(nproc --all) --io 2 --vm 2 and open your web browser, use it for a minute or two. If your system freezes, your CPU/GPU is not getting enough power. Force reboot and reduce your undervolt by 5mV (-100mV to -95mV) and re-run the tests. Repeat till it’s stable.

You can also undervolt further if the system is fully stable at -100mV by increasing the undervolt in increments of 5mV (-100mV to -105mV). When your system eventually freezes, go back one step. I like to leave it at -100mV.

Run sudo systemctl enable --now intel-undervolt to make the undervolt persistent.

zRAM

Packages: zram-generator

We’re downloading more RAM, bois.

zRAM is essentially swap that lives in the RAM. RAM is exponentially faster than even modern nVMEs, allowing much faster swapping compared to storage backed swap. zRAM provides a compressed block device in RAM. It comes at a cost of CPU cycles due to compression, but modern CPUs and compression algorithms make this cost negligible.

Open /etc/systemd/zram-generator.conf and paste the following content:

[zram0]
zram-size = min(ram / 2, 8192)
compression-algorithm = zstd

This creates a zRAM device that’s 50% of your actual RAM capacity (capped at 8GB) and sets zstd as its compression algorithm. People usually go for lz4, but zstd has seen many improvements recently and is a good option.

Out-Of-Memory Killer

Desktop Linux sucks under high memory pressure. The system just freezes up for me at around 70% memory usage on the stock kernel. Zen makes this much better, and we can improve it further by setting up an OOM daemon. I use systemd-oomd.

Run sudo -E systemctl edit user@service and copy the contents:

[Service]
ManagedOOMMemoryPressure=kill
ManagedOOMMemoryPressureLimit=50%

Run sudo -E systemctl edit user.slice and copy the contents:

[Slice]
ManagedOOMSwap=kill

Append the following to /etc/systemd/system.conf:

DefaultCPUAccounting=yes
DefaultIOAccounting=yes
DefaultMemoryAccounting=yes
DefaultTasksAccounting=yes

Append the following to /etc/systemd/oomd.conf:

[OOM]
SwapUsedLimitPercent=90%
DefaultMemoryPressureDurationSec=20s

Finally, run sudo systemctl enable --now systemd-oomd to enable the daemon. You can test it by running systemd-run --user tail /dev/zero and monitoring the memory usage using a resource monitor.

The above configs were taken from this Reddit post, which was in turn taken from the Fedora defaults.

CPU Frequency Scaling

Packages: auto-cpufreq-git

auto-cpufreq intelligently scales CPU frequencies and supports both Intel and AMD CPUs. Installation is as simple as installing the package and enabling the service:

sudo systemctl enable --now auto-cpufreq

The author of auto-cpufreq suggests not to use TLP along with it, but you could disable all CPU-related options in TLP and use both. I don’t use TLP as it gives many issues for me such as Wi-Fi and audio.

Runtime Power Management

Runtime power management can be enabled for devices using the following command:

sudo find /sys -regex '.*?power/control$' ! -path '*usb*' -exec bash -c 'echo on > {}; echo auto > {}' \;

The kernel exposes runtime PM settings for devices via a sysfs file (/sys/devices/…/power/wakeup). Writing “on” to it disables runtime PM and writing “auto” enables it. The above command enables it for all devices except ones connected through USB. If you want to leave a certain device untouched, you can exclude it. For example, to exclude wlp8s0, add ! -path '*wlp8s0*' to the command.

To automate this, create /etc/systemd/system/powersave.service and copy the following contents:

[Unit]
Description=Powersave auto tune
After=suspend.target
After=hibernate.target
After=hybrid-sleep.target

[Service]
Type=oneshot
ExecStart=/usr/bin/bash -c "find /sys -regex '.*?power/control$' ! -path '*usb*' -exec bash -c 'echo on > {}; echo auto > {}' \\\;"

[Install]
WantedBy=suspend.target
WantedBy=hibernate.target
WantedBy=hybrid-sleep.target
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Run sudo systemctl enable --now powersave.service. Thanks to @kerneltoast for this script.

I/O Scheduler

Arch Wiki suggests none for NVMe drives, mq-deadline for SSDs and eMMCs, and bfq for traditional HDDs.

Create a file /etc/udev/rules.d/60-ioschedulers.rules and paste the following content:

# set scheduler for NVMe
ACTION=="add|change", KERNEL=="nvme[0-9]n[0-9]", ATTR{queue/scheduler}="none"
# set scheduler for SSD and eMMC
ACTION=="add|change", KERNEL=="sd[a-z]*|mmcblk[0-9]*", ATTR{queue/rotational}=="0", ATTR{queue/scheduler}="mq-deadline"
# set scheduler for rotating disks
ACTION=="add|change", KERNEL=="sd[a-z]*", ATTR{queue/rotational}=="1", ATTR{queue/scheduler}="bfq"

Changes will be performed after a reboot or running sudo udevadm trigger.

Zen kernel tunes I/O schedulers so there’s no need to touch anything else.

AUR Optimizations

Create ~/.makepkg.conf and copy the following contents:

#!/hint/bash

CFLAGS="$(echo $CFLAGS | sed 's/-march=x86-64 -mtune=generic/-march=native/')"
CXXFLAGS="$CFLAGS -Wp,-D_GLIBCXX_ASSERTIONS"
RUSTFLAGS="-C opt-level=2 -C target-cpu=native"

MAKEFLAGS="-j$(nproc)"
COMPRESSZST=(zstd -c -z -q --threads=0 -)
COMPRESSXZ=(xz -c -z --threads=0 -)

This enables some compiler optimization flags which results in a faster binary that’s optimized for your CPU. It also speeds up compile and install times for AUR packages by using all available threads.

Conclusion

I hope you’ve benefitted from these tweaks. If you have any suggestions, please message me via mail or Signal and I’ll add them.