So the Archwiki has most of the must have info. These are just my notes on what I'm doing to keep my new linux laptop happy!
Copying system.conf to /etc/systemd or setting RuntimeWatchdogSec to a value should have systemd enable the hardware watchdog.
Well as of 3.18 it is working acceptably. My main issue is that the trackpage has a physical "click" which does nothing. You have to tap on the trackpad to register a click which is the opposite of how most of my other machines work. (The non-function clicking appears to be me specific. Others report it working!) I'm still using a mouse most of the time.
Another option I haven't had a chance to play with is Hugh Greenberg's port of the cmt trackpad driver from ChromiumOS. That should in theory work better than the synaptics.
yaourt -S zramswap; systemctl enable zramswap; systemctl start zramswap This will add zram compressed memory to the system as swap.
Either mount ext4/btrfs with discard, or systemctl enable fstrim.timer which will periodically run fstrim to clean up the HD.
Just setting the index=1 in the modprobe is usually enough to make the internal speakers the default audio source