Interesting. I recently switched from arch to popOS, and one thing that I noticed was that my laptop no longer dropped frames watching 1080p youtube, and the subtitles do a better job keeping up at 2x speed. This is supposedly due to a different scheduler.

Granted, while I've got no hard evidence I'm thermal throttling, I probably need to reapply thermal paste. When I did that for an old laptop my temps dropped by 20c and it noticeably improved it's performance.

You probably didn't install/enable hardware acceleration in arch as described here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Hardware_video_acceleration

Yeah, I've been using linux for over 20 years, but I was pretty shocked by the number of sharp edges I encountered with arch. A recent update basically borked grub. On investigating the issue I found that the arch maintainers were shipping grub builds from the grub master branch, and when I pointed out this might not be the best idea the maintainer got huffy and said maybe I wasn't 'ready for arch'.

I installed popOS that day. I miss the AUR a bit, but pop resolves most of the issues I had with ubuntu, and starts and runs noticeably faster than arch, so all in all I'm pretty happy with it. It's a shame that arch can be so user hostile. I really admire it's wiki.

I recently switched from Arch to Fedora Silverblue. I have my terminal open directly into an Archlinux container created by Distrobox. In there I have all my usual bits and bobs installed from the main Arch repos, plus the aur. Even graphical stuff, like Sublime Music, which I export to the host. But you don't need to be running Silverblue. You should give it a shot on PopOS; it really makes you feel at home coming from Arch.

If done right this could be a baby step towards Qubes, https://www.qubes-os.org/