Am I missing something? If so, leave your tips below…
Gnome Wayland
Gnome screen refresh rate set to 144hz
amd pstate with ondemand governor
Kernel: Zen
Firefox 105.01
Firefox running in Wayland mode
Firefox with hardware acceleration working (vaapi)
Firefox with Pocket plugin disabled
Firefox with Ublock origin enabled
Firefox running with psd (profile sync daemon)
Firefox refresh rate set to 144hz
bigger SSD if it is almost full, or remove unnecessary files to get more free space
About DEs: I’m quite happy with the speed of Xfce on my 11 years old laptop.
I use Xfce on other machines as well so that various tweaks and settings wouldn’t be too different between them.
Tbh if your system is smooth and fast already there isn’t much you can do. Minus hardware changes a lot of tweaks to Linux provide so little or questionable benefit they really don’t matter.
Short of going GUI free you’d be better served to look at how you can make your system more secure vs faster.
See how much linux eats your battery overnight. Let’s say for 12 hours. How do you put him to sleep. For me it is over 30% and it is unacceptable. For Windows 5%
You may find that you have something to do with your linux
Did you compare zen kernel’s performance against xanmod, maybe it can boost your performance a bit. Xanmod is not officially supported by Arch unlike Zen though.