Got Antergos up and running with no major issues except two. So far.

1. When playing back videos in Totem, the brightness is too low. I went into the preferences and when I clicked on the ‘Brightness’ slider to increase it, the video was still playing (I could hear the audio) but the Totem screen went totally black. I had to reset it to default to get video working. Any ideas?

2. So I thought, no biggie if I can’t fix the brightness in Totem, I’ll just install VLC. VLC has perfect brightness but, when I scrub the video, the picture will freeze (but I hear audio) and a few seconds later, it stars playing fine. Or, when I scrub, I’ll get horrible pixelation on the screen for a few seconds. I tried adjusting the Input/Output codec and adjust the ‘Hardware Acceleration’ methods but no matter what I pick, same problem. (I don't get this pixelation and weird scrubbing problem with Totem so I highly doubt it's my gfx driver causing this.)

Any help would be greatly appreciated. If it matters, I’m using the Nvidia 384.59 driver for my 670 GTX.

Thanks

On your issues,
1. In /sys, besides a lot of junk there's files relating to brightness. These commands find me these relevant files.
With your nvidia card, these will be slightly different. They store numbers. You can read them with 'cat' and write to them (as root) with 'echo [value] > [file]'. Do not adjust or exceed max_brightness.

2. How do you "scrub" a video? Forgive me, I'm old school. You're best finding something that works on your box/distro and then sticking to it. If totem works, why not use it?

Thanks for the brightness info! Question though... will this ONLY adjust brightness for the Totem app? Brightness in Antergos itself is perfect. When I play back videos in Totem, it's as if the Totem brightness is lowered to 20 or 30 (100 being nice and bright).

As for scrubbing a video, I just mean clicking on the little bubble (that shows you were you are on the timeline of a movie) and moving it forward because you maybe want to skip to the half-way point of a movie or skip to your favorite scene. When I release the 'bubble/slider', I get pixelation for a few seconds or frozen video for a few seconds then it plays perfectly. I don't have this issue with Totem but the brightness in that app is screwed up.

And your last statement, about finding a distro that does everything perfectly and sticking with it, easier said than done. Case in point;

Ubuntu: Weird permission error when trying to add items into that "Automatic Startup" applet. Grew tired of trying to figure it out and moved on.

Mint Cinnamon: Love their Cinnamon desktop but had really bad screen tearing problems when exiting out of rdesktop that I could not resolve. (Yes, tried adding the ForceCompositePipeline stuff in xorg.conf)

Mint Mate: Not a fan of the Mate desktop but I needed it so I could have the ability to use Compton which eliminated the rdesktop/screen tearing issue. Really don't like Mate though so I'm working on fixing the interface to make it more Cinnamon-ish. A part of me doesn't like the slow updates in the Debian world, when used on my main PC. Leaning towards a rolling release disro which lead me to Antergos.

Antergos: Rolling release so packages stay fresh. Cinnamon desktop, which I love. But, Totem video playback is too dark and VLC has pixelation/scrubbing issues when watching videos.

This is off the top of my head and I'm not listing all the little quirks I've come across when testing various distros. The past year or so, I really think I've tried every major disro out there and haven't found one that did everything perfectly for me. My new media server (when it's built) will run Debian 9.x because I need long term stability, support and rock solid up-time.

Right now, I'm shopping around for a distro that will be my 'lite gaming/surf the internet and check emails' OS.

That's a global brightness adjustment. If it's just totem, then that app seems to have the issue

On a side note, your approach to linux seems to be: "If at first you don't succeed, give up!" If you want to become proficient with linux, you have to resolve problems, not run away from them. That's when you learn something. The answer is usually waiting in a well crafted web search.

Let me give you an example from years ago. I had 2 troublesome usb ports on one motherboard which were the only 2 wired out. Buying usb sockets (on the metal of a pci or isa slot) provided more ports. I emailed the kernel ehci maintainer, and he said there was an issue of long standing, but he had nothing to go on. He continued: "Get me logs so I can see what's up." I eventually got on the chipset manufacturer's website forum, and vented. My post was immediately scrubbed, but they put a programmer on my problem. I had to update to the latest kernel (an ordeal in itself). Their programmer wrote a patch, which he patched until it worked, and I had to patch, build and test it every time (3 rebuilds). Then we had a system (my system) with the dud usb ports which pumped out values into syslog.

I then deleted the old syslog, worked the ports with the resulting mayhem in the box, added comments myself as to what was going into and out of the ports, and sent a Meg or so of that syslog off to the ehci maintainer. With this information, he could see that the ports were certifiably mad, and that what went on in the registers bore no resemblance to reality or standards. It transpired the chip manufacturer had disabled those ports in later versions of the chipset. It was a hardware fault in the ASIC. The eventual kernel patch may have done a chipset check, and ignored certain non critical errors to prevent the mayhem that had been going on. This fixed an issue of long standing AFAIK that chipset manufacturer is no more.

I felt the effort was worthwhile, because everybody wanted a solution and I had the hardware that offered the critical data. It alsop solved my problem and contributed to kernel development. What percentage of that would you have done?

Not sure if I agree with your characterization. I gave you a VERY BRIEF breakdown of some of the issues I've ran into with Linux. As I originally stated, some of what I typed was omitted for brevity.

I've been playing with Linux on and off for a very long time. I really had no reason to switch from Windows as it did everything I needed it to. But then Windows 10 came along. I refuse to run an OS that spies on me and makes it impossible to turn off ALL telemetry. As a result of that, and the support life cycle of Windows 7 drawing to an end, I must search for a desktop OS. Debian will be my server OS (after months and months of testing and addressing issues) but for my desktop, I think it's coming down to Mint or Antergos.

When I run into a problem, I will absolutely post a question asking for help. Some times I'll post here, other times I post on the forums for the particular distro I'm having problems with. Some times I find the answer myself after digging around and on a few occasions, my question goes unanswered and after a week or two of no replies to my post, I'll scratch that distro off my list. I mean, if I ask for help with distro X and nobody replies after X weeks, what's the point of continuing to use it?

For my current issues with Antergos, I posted in their forums (and here obviously) and am just waiting on a reply. In the mean time, I posted the same question on VLC's forum since it appears to be isolated to VLC and not a distro or Nvidia problem. So I don't think it's accurate to say that I give up if I don't succeed right off the bat.

As a work around for my Antergos/VLC issue though, I installed MPV and scrubbing works perfectly with no gfx issues.