i THINK the wiki is outdated, but im not sure. When i installed arch a couple of months ago it seemed to work out of the box as well(with a dedicated gpu).
As for the jitter in firefox, i have had the same problem on fedora kde(which i’m currently dailying), which happened only recently. I think its a bug in firefox, and while reinstalling arch and updating the system, a new update for firefox that fixed the issue also got installed.
I couldn’t speak to how you might do it on windows or mac. but as you mentioned linux… most popular linux backup applications have features such as backup on shutdown or backup on startup, which might help as you don’t have to think about it (atleast with the backup at shutdown).
But just a word of caution as you’re still in school, DON’T use a distribution(version of linux) that is called bleeding edge or unstable, use a “stable” distribution. the bleeding edge is fun, but it’s more trouble than it is worth when you don’t have a lot of time.