No, you're thinking along the right lines. These things are kernel tune ables. If you thumb through the sysfs kernel docs you can find loads of options on this sort of thing.

YOLO mountflags for ext4 that minimize synchronous writes:

    data=writeback,journal_async_commit,lazytime,nobarrier,commit=99999

Good for caches, scratch space, build dirs and anything that can be rebuilt from other data but it'll get corrupted during any non-graceful shutdown.

overlayfs offers an even more aggressive mount option "volatile" which ignores all O_SYNC or fsyncs, but no other filesystem exposes that tradeoff.

Have a look at dedicated external journal disk performance for ext4. It actually is pretty fast, and relatively safe.

I find performance wise, a logging fs like f2fs is actually not as terrible as one would expect for most use-cases:

UUID=abc /home f2fs defaults,noatime,nodiratime,noquota,discard,nobarrier,inline_xattr,inline_data 0 2

These settings heavily depends on your OS, hardware, and use-case.

This profile is what I prefer for AORUS 5/RTX3070/i7-12700H/16GB laptops, and despite how terrible the OEM hardware is... this setup will run acceptably well with dual Intel 670p M.2 drives.

The following should work with most Debian variants, but is hardly optimal for every platform. But if your laptop is similar, than it should be a good place to start. One caveat, when ejecting media it may take some time to flush your buffers.

sudo nano /etc/sysctl.conf

net.ipv4.conf.all.rp_filter = 1

net.ipv4.conf.default.rp_filter = 1

# Ignore ICMP broadcast requests

net.ipv4.icmp_echo_ignore_broadcasts = 1

# Disable source packet routing

net.ipv4.conf.all.accept_source_route = 0

net.ipv6.conf.all.accept_source_route = 0

net.ipv4.conf.default.accept_source_route = 0

net.ipv6.conf.default.accept_source_route = 0

# Ignore send redirects

net.ipv4.conf.all.send_redirects = 0

net.ipv4.conf.default.send_redirects = 0

net.ipv4.tcp_syncookies = 1

net.ipv4.tcp_max_syn_backlog = 2048

net.ipv4.tcp_synack_retries = 2

net.ipv4.tcp_syn_retries = 5

net.ipv4.conf.all.log_martians = 1

net.ipv4.icmp_ignore_bogus_error_responses = 1

net.ipv4.conf.all.accept_redirects = 0

net.ipv6.conf.all.accept_redirects = 0

net.ipv4.conf.default.accept_redirects = 0

net.ipv6.conf.default.accept_redirects = 0

net.ipv4.icmp_echo_ignore_all = 1

#ban list mem

net.core.rmem_default=8388608

net.core.wmem_default=8388608

#prevent TCP hijack in older kernels

net.ipv4.tcp_challenge_ack_limit = 999999999

#may be needed to reduce failed TCP links

net.ipv4.tcp_timestamps=0

net.ipv4.tcp_rfc1337=1

net.ipv4.tcp_workaround_signed_windows=1

net.ipv4.tcp_fack=1

net.ipv4.tcp_low_latency=1

net.ipv4.ip_no_pmtu_disc = 0

net.ipv4.tcp_sack = 1

net.ipv4.tcp_mtu_probing = 1

net.ipv4.tcp_frto=2

net.ipv4.tcp_frto_response=2

net.ipv4.tcp_congestion_control = cubic

net.ipv4.tcp_window_scaling = 1

kernel.exec-shield=1

kernel.randomize_va_space=1

#reboot on kernel panic after 20 sec

kernel.panic=20

vm.swappiness=1

vm.vfs_cache_pressure=50

#percentage of system memory that can be filled with dirty pages

# run to check io performance with: sudo vmstat 1 20

vm.dirty_background_ratio=60

#maximum amount of system memory filled with dirty pages before committed

vm.dirty_ratio=80

vm.dirty_background_bytes=2684354560

vm.dirty_bytes=5368709120

#how often the flush processes wake up and check

vm.dirty_writeback_centisecs=10000

#how long something can be in cache before it needs to be written

vm.dirty_expire_centisecs=60000

vm.min_free_kbytes = 16384

# increase system file descriptor limit

fs.file-max=120000

#CONNTRACK_MAX = RAMSIZE (in bytes) / 16384 / (number_of_bits_in_a_pointer / 32)

#low power CPU should halve mem usage limits

net.ipv4.netfilter.ip_conntrack_max = 16384

net.netfilter.nf_conntrack_max = 16384

net.nf_conntrack_max = 16384

net.ipv4.netfilter.ip_conntrack_tcp_timeout_established = 86400

kernel.pid_max = 32767

net.ipv4.ip_local_port_range = 2000 65000