Supercharge Your Linux System

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Table of Contents

This post started out as a repository of tweaks for Arch Linux, although you can apply most of it to any distro. To ensure this post stays relevant, I’ve linked to Arch Wiki sections when possible. AMD-specific optimisations are not covered. Ubuntu-specific optimisations can be found at the end of the post.

I update this post regularly. If you have any suggestions, feel free to mail me!

Basics

Go through the Arch installation guide. If you have an SSD and plan on wiping your drive, do a memory cell clearing to restore factory write speeds. I go with Ext4 for my partitions. Refer to the bytes-per-inode ratio and reserved block sections before creating your Ext4 partition. As for the kernel, just use the default or linux-zen. Don’t bother with all those fancy-sounding custom kernels you find out there. Go through the general recommendations. Except for security, because protection is no fun.

Desktop Environment

GNOME and XFCE are both solid options for a desktop environment. I prefer GNOME. Installing gnome-shell-performance and mutter-performance from the AUR will greatly improve your experience. If your PC is extremely slow, you can use XFCE with it’s compositor disabled for more performance. Enable TearFree to eliminate screen tearing when the compositor is off.

Graphics

Set up your GPU drivers. I use EnvyControl to manage NVIDIA Optimus. I keep my dGPU disabled unless I need it for gaming. Go through Intel graphics for Intel. Take a look at GuC/HuC firmware loading and framebuffer compression in particular. I would also suggest turning off GPU mitigations (i915.mitigations=off).

Install appropriate drivers and verify hardware video acceleration. Set appropriate values for LIBVA_DRIVER_NAME and VDPAU_DRIVER by adding export commands to /etc/profile.d/env.sh. Adding them to bashrc won’t work, these environment variables must be set in the login shell.

If you game, install and use gamemode to improve performance. I don’t game anymore, so I don’t keep up with gaming optimisations in particular.

Browser

For Firefox, refer to the hardware acceleration section. Check out touchscreen gestures and pixel-perfect trackpad scrolling. Export them from env.sh.

For Chromium and Chromium-based browsers, refer to the hardware acceleration and force GPU acceleration sections. You can verify it at chrome://gpu. Video decoding information is at the bottom of the page. You can enable touchpad gestures on Chromium too. To enable middle mouse button scrolling, add the following flags: --test-type --enable-blink-features=MiddleClickAutoscroll.

Profile-sync-daemon can help speed up your browser performance by storing your browser profiles in tmpfs. You can also store your browser cache in tmpfs, Arch has instructions for both Firefox and Chromium, although I only use PSD.

Power Management

Now onto power management. I use a script by kerneltoast that enables runtime power management for all devices (except USB). Create /etc/systemd/system/powersave.service with the following contents and enable it by sudo systemctl enable --now powersave.service.

[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

For CPU frequency scaling, install power-profiles-daemon and enable it. If your CPU doesn’t support hardware P-states (you can check your Intel or AMD CPU), you can use auto-cpufreq instead. Note that Zen kernel disables the intel_pstate driver needed by power-profiles-daemon; pass intel_pstate=enable to the kernel args to enable it. Don’t bother with TLP or other such tools.

Install thermald if you have an Intel CPU.

If possible, undervolt your CPU and GPU. For Intel, you can disable SGX in your BIOS to disable the Plundervolt fixes, which should enable undervolting on newer machines. Don’t be put off by the warning on the Arch Wiki page. I have my CPU undervolted to -150mV and GPU to -100mV. Your mileage will vary. Start at -80mV for the CPU and -50mV for the GPU.

Memory Management

Don’t use swapfiles or swap partitions, use zram instead. As we’re not swapping to disk, make sure to disable zswap by adding the zswap.enabled=0 kernel parameter. My machine has plenty of RAM, so I don’t use zram and also disable zswap.

Misc. Tweaks

Linux has had official NTFS drivers since 5.15, but there are no official userspace utilities for NTFS3. Install ntfsprogs-ntfs3 from the AUR. This lets you use all the NTFS-3G utilities but with NTFS3 instead.

Other tweaks that I perform:

Ubuntu-Specific Optimisations

Install zlib-ng, the instructions are provided in the link.

Disable swap by removing the swap.img line in /etc/fstab and running sudo swapoff -a. You can delete /swap.img to reclaim the disk space. Setup zram if needed. To setup zram, install zram-tools and run sudo systemctl enable --now zramswap. You can configure zram settings at /etc/default/zramswap.

Disable AppArmor by adding apparmor=0 to your kernel args and running sudo systemctl disable --now apparmor.

Liquiorix kernel is the Ubuntu equivalent of Zen on Arch Linux. I use the default kernel. If you want to install it, run the following command:

curl -s 'https://liquorix.net/install-liquorix.sh' | sudo bash

Ubuntu 24.04 added several low-latency tunables to their default kernel, explained in this post. I use the following: preempt=full rcu_nocbs=all rcutree.enable_rcu_lazy=1

Changelog

Note: Changes made before 06 Sep 24 are not covered.