Okay, So I am thinking of switching from Manjaro to Archbang (Just easier to setup and quicker for me) but I would like some advice on what choices I wish to make.
LXDE-Qt as my DE.
Is this a decent environment to use daily? I am unsure if it is still in alpha/beta testing but what is it like compared to the GTK version? Does it use less resources? I dont expect much in the way of resource uses anyway from LXDE.
Chromium or Firefox?
Okay so I love firefox, I love the ability to customise it, tweak it and just go wild, but I dont like the fact it is flash reliant, it is rather annoying, is there a way around it? or should I just go Chromium instead, they are both open source, and I wish to stay as open as possible.
RadeonSI or AMD Catalyst?
Now I hear from Zoltan RadeonSI works well on his GPU, but what is it like on an AMD 8330 (A4 5000) APU? I dont mind although I will be going stable catalyst over beta (I found it makes my GPU hotter on my desktop) I expect the answer to be "Go Catalyst" but as said in previous statement, I want to be open source.
Tweaks and other things.
Any other things that I could use to make arch faster, boot quicker and less power hungry, all that good stuff, I cant add any memory into my APU, its locked at 512MB :( dam lockdowns!
So yeah any advice, links are tips that will help me are welcome :)
Install pure arch, or antergos, haven't tried archbang but if it just installs arch without modifying some things for you then it's fine.
For the desktop i don't have experience with LXDE, I'm a GNOME guy with the occasional KDE or enlightenment when I break my GNOME. Since I've seen from other posts that you hate GNOME, give e18 (maybe even go with 19) a try it's light and works well.
I mostly use chromium just because of the better flash and one or two extensions that I can't find on firefox because they were written by google (I can only think of dictionary now, where you doubleclick a word and it gives you either a definition, an extract from the first search page or a translation if it's a foreign language, that last feature is a killer for me as I'm often reading text in German and I still don't understand all words there)
If you want to use the newest xorg you have to go with beta for catalyst currently so consider that. I would say try both and see how it works out for you, remember Catalyst means no KMS unless you have a muxless hybrid card, this will mess up some nice boot animations you might have had I think and some other compatibility issues, also lack of support for newer kernels (This is usually fixed by the arch maintainers while the new kernel is in rc unless there are bigger changes). The big issue though is breakage with new xorg, so you usually have to wait a release before upgrading your xorg, you will feel the pain of this especially if you're like me and run testing instead of stable (Arch repos not Catalyst).
If you go with RadeonSI make sure you are using a kernel >= 3.13 and enable the radeion.dpi or sth like that, this will enable the power management and will greatly reduce heat output in your card. 3.14 has even more improvements in this area.
If you're looking for possible benchmarks check if Phoronix has anything relevant, usually they don't do laptops so you might not be lucky.
Optimizations: Follow the wiki for power optimizations there are tons and can bring the power down and the battery levels really high if you do the customizations manually (but make sure you understand what you're changing). Wiki has other speed optimizations, mainly decrease your swapiness if you have enough RAM, there's also the usual talk about installing on an SSD if it's an option (My linux installation resides on a 32GB msata that was supposed to be used as cache, and it works great). To speed up the browser, consider moving your profile to RAM or tmpfs (there are good guides on the wiki but I'm too lazy to link right now sorry). If you have enough RAM also consider shifting your temp directory into RAM, maybe also your /var/log/ directory (you can disable than if you need logs) these are not gaming related I know but they usually can speedup your work
Okay I fiddled with the Catalyst driver last night, lets say this, the screen did not like it one bit, So how do I activate RadeonSI? can it be downloaded via AUR/Repos? I also have the 3.13 kernel so I am safe there :) and can you link me the Radeon.dpi stuff, cant find it.
decided to go with iron browser also, less security flaws as far as I can see.
Also learned that Arch stopped officially supporting Catalyst, which is annoying, but AMD brought this on them selfs.
What were the errors in Catalyst? I have had catalyst complaining about no screens found before when either the module was not correctly loaded or I had the wrong driver (In my case I have hybrid graphics which is the pxp package while I tried to install a normal package)
Anyway to get RadeonSI you just need the latest X and install the radeon graphics from the repos as normal,
it's called radeon.dpm sorry, https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/ATI follow this guide to get the opensource drivers working for you. The radeon.dpm=1 line should be added to your kernel parameters at boot (so edit either Grub or whatever boot manager you use and append this to the end of the boot line)
Arch removed catalyst support because of the slow development on the catalyst side with Xorg support but the repositories they link to in the wiki and the aur packages are good, the maintainer is trustworthy and know what he's doing (or at least it looks like that to me)