I just got this laptop (Asus TUF A15 2021) today and it surprised me that everything works just fine out of the box on Vanilla Arch, except NVIDIA gpu I had to install it manually on battery power that’s why I enable powersaving mode. As for games performance it’s basically the same as windows no more no less.
In college I had an aluminum body laptop that mostly sat in its dock. I cut a sheet of thermal gap fill to the size of two heatsinks and put one over the cpu and one over the gpu. It shaved off a few degrees