Overall, very happy with how well CachyOS runs on this. 

Had to do a bit of tweaking to get it running a bit more optimally but that was just a matter of providing a few kernel arguments. I also capped the 10900k CPU to 4.6ghz in BIOS and configured Intel-undervolt with a 120mv undervolt and 160w power limit, stock CPU power limit is 250w. This laptop runs a lot quieter now than it does on Windows but one of the main reasons for that I believe is the crappy Alienware Command Center software overriding the default fan curves with horrible ones. Out of the box on Linux the fan curve is a lot smoother and a lot quieter unless under a heavy load of course and I also noticed out of the box when I set the power profile in KDE it automatically adjust the fan curve which is sick.

A few extra changes I made was I got rid of octopi and setup pamac which I much prefer and I also removed Plymouth and unnecessary hooks from the initramfs which knocked a good few seconds off the boot time.

I’m also quite impressed by the performance, it is incredibly snappy, but the one thing I was quite sceptical about was GPU and gaming performance because Nvidia drivers yuck, however it seems the drivers have improved lately. When I first tested after installing though it was awful however adding the nvidia-drm.modeset=1 kernel argument made a huge difference and now I don’t seem to be noticing any loss in performance compared to Windows. Games I’ve tested so far: Final Fantasy VII Remake, Clair Obscur and Crysis 2 Remastered.

There is only two things on this laptop that do not work with Linux, the Tobii eye tracking but that’s ass anyway and the Alienware RGB, the RGB controller is recognised and it’s USB based and I can see it and open RGB but there is obviously no profile for it so it just recognises it as a Dell G series controller so it just as weird stuff when I try to change anything. I do still have a small Windows partition for some VR games and also to control the RGB. As the RGB controller is USB base, it can also be controlled from a virtual machine very easily. 

Installed CachyOS on my Alienware Area51M R2 and Couldn’t be happier.