@khedron and everyone else.

khedron’s dconf config works for me. Thanks everyone!

If the crackling is only audible with heavy bass, then it might be that the audio signal is clipping, but then again you said there’s no problems with headphones. Are you using an audio equalizer? Did you increase bass frequencies? I assume audio works fine in Windows without crackling, both with internal speakers and headphones?

As far as system volume, check alsamixer:

$ alsamixer

Glad to hear!

Your kenel is the latest and greatest. Have you tried using the LTS kernel?

I battled a Realtek wi-fi card for far too long in my Lenovo TP using various Ubuntus, Fedora, and Antergos. Nothing i did worked reliably. You symptoms are similar to what I experienced. I had brief kernel bliss with 4.9, but then it started acting up at some point in 4.10 and newer. There were even inconsistencies between the Ubuntus on the same kernel - wifi only worked with Ubuntu Gnome 16.04 and not in any of the other flavors. I gave up and replaced the Realtek with an Intel card. This is probably your easiest solution.

If i’m not mistaken, there’s one guy, Larry Finger, that maintains the Realtek drivers for Linux, and he uses openSUSE. If replacing your wifi card isn’t an option, then you might want to give openSUSE a spin.

@anarch thanks for the suspend tab add-on recommendation. FF is much speedier now.

I use a VPN and mostly FF with multiple add-ons for general web surfing. I pay for Google Drive cloud storage and generally like Chrome, especially since I use a Chromecast dongle quite often, and have an Android phone, but find Chromium to be a little faster. Chromecast doesn’t appear to be well supported in Chromium, or I just can’t get it to work. Playing around with Vivaldi now. I like it.

It sounds like your Broadcom card was working at one point in time. I don’t have a solution, but at some point you have to consider if it’s worth your time and trouble. As someone that struggled to get a poorly supported Realtek wifi card to work with Linux, I would just get Linux supported card like Intel or Atheros. Some kernels would work, but most would not. I got tired of the weak USB wifi dongle. In the end I swallowed my pride. My Intel wifi card was around $30 with shipping. Best $30 i ever spent on hardware

@cookiedemon As was mentioned before, if you’re using Gnome+LightDM, you might want to consider using GDM as a DM instead as the various lid/switch/power/dim functions are supported when using Gnome + GDM. I never had an issue when running Gnome+GDM on a Lenovo laptop. You may want to tweak and comment your /etc/systemd/logind.conf as well. I’m considering moving to GDM only for the supported screen dimming, but LightDM is fine for now with my laptop habits.

Thanks everyone. Looks like gcc needs to be all multilib or not otherwise dependency conflicts arise.

:: Synchronizing package databases...
 antergos is up to date
 core is up to date
 extra is up to date
 community is up to date
 multilib is up to date
 Foreign packages: / 9 / 9

==> Software upgrade (new version) :
core/gcc                   6.3.1-2    -> 7.1.1-2
extra/fuse-common          3.0.1-1    -> 3.0.2-1
extra/python2-setuptools   1:35.0.2-1 -> 1:36.0.0-1
extra/python-setuptools    1:35.0.2-1 -> 1:36.0.0-1
multilib/gcc-libs-multilib 6.3.1-2    -> 7.1.1-3
multilib/lib32-gcc-libs    6.3.1-2    -> 7.1.1-3

==> New package :
core/gcc-libs              7.1.1-2    (required by gcc)

==> Continue upgrade ? [Y/n]
==> [V]iew package detail   [M]anually select packages
==> --------------------------------------------------
==> y
:: Starting full system upgrade...
resolving dependencies...
looking for conflicting packages...
warning: removing 'gcc-libs' from target list because it conflicts with 'gcc-libs-multilib'
error: failed to prepare transaction (could not satisfy dependencies)
:: gcc: requires gcc-libs=7.1.1-2

Both gcc-libs and gcc-libs-multilib were updated a couple of days ago and no bug reports have been issued. It looks like the multilib is a reverse conflict. What does this mean?
https://www.archlinux.org/packages/core/x86_64/gcc-libs/
https://www.archlinux.org/packages/multilib/x86_64/gcc-libs-multilib/

I have the multilib repository enabled for my Brother printer. The drivers are supplied from AUR. Any solutions? With the deprecation of 32 bit support, does this mean that the multilib repository will be no longer?

I was only asking to see if you had tried other options. Since the PKGBUILDs for the Brother drivers essentially follow to the same format and content, with small tweaks, you hay be able to hack one. Sorry, but I don’t have an exact solution. If you do find one, please post here for anyone else though.