Thanks for sharing.
I was personally not motivated/good enough to write a new tool so I’ve wrote scripts to use rofi (easily adaptable to dmenu) as:

• an app launcher
• a clipboard manager
• an infobar to show things like the date/time, memory usage, disk space, battery level, wifi signal…
• an omnibar to perform an internet search, quick units conversions
• a calculator for simple math
• a bookmark manager (list, open, edit, add, remove)
• a password/2FA token manager (list, edit, add, remove, autofill internet fields)
• a wifi manager
• a vpn manager

I’ve explained the basis here if you’re curious. Even though I was bad at keeping my code up to date you may get some ideas to expand your program.

Thank you very much for your feedback. I’ve spent quite some time trying to create a minimalist and efficient theme. Very glad to hear that I met this goal.

I’ve explained my choice for zsh here

Nicely configured it’s so convenient that I spend most of my time in the terminal and don’t even use a file explorer anymore. It can also be expanded with some plugins for specific use-cases.

nomacs could be an option and is multi platform

Thanks for sharing!

Using Ublock picker (not zapper) you can block/allow elements per domain and save/revert your choices. But overall, like I already said, I agree with you that umatrix offered a more granular and easy approach. It would be nice to see that implemented in Ublock. I nonetheless understand why it’s not the case since it would benefit only few users and may scared most of the others.

Hopefully umatrix will work for you for a long time. For me it was not and that’s how I discovered Ublock and adapt to its “limitations”. On a daily basis it helps me browse the internet like umatrix did. It’s just sad that umatrix was not forked.

I noticed that it was not maintained when some pop-ups showed up while they used to be blocked. I also first missed that level of granularity from umatrix. You can replicate it with the element picker mode in Ublock but I realized that I could live with the “basic” Ublock advanced settings.

Umatrix was awesome but is unfortunately not maintained anymore since July 21, 2021. Ublock origin is a perfect replacement though and can be deeply configured behind its simpler appearance. Coupled with the LibRedirect add-on in the Librewolf browser and I can navigate ad and tracking free.

LibreWolf is indeed based on the hardened Firefox arkenfox user.js so you get its benefits which means a privacy-focused browser but Librewolf also comes with more settings pre-adjusted, telemetry removed, useless features removed…

I’ve played with Firefox settings for years before Librewolf was created and it saves me so much time, ensure my browser stays up to date and functional, and is able to perform fingerprints test way better than any other many web browsers I’ve tried.

There was just a similar post here. You may find interesting clues there as well.

Glad you’re back on tracks! Looks like this update messed up /bin for some people. I love when OPs like you take time to close their first post with the resolution. Thank you. If you have time to quickly summarize the details of the fix that may benefit others as well.

I’ll put the link to the wiki here again ;) https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Chroot

"Run arch-chroot with the new root directory as first argument:

# arch-chroot /path/to/new/root

You can now do most of the operations available from your existing installation. Some tasks which needs D-Bus will not work as noted in #Usage"

To investigate the issue you may want to use a bootable drive and chroot into your system. This will allow you to see any error messages using the journactl command. Once you know what’s going on exactly you’ll be able to fix it or get a better assistance from people here or on the Arch forum.
I know someone who encountered the exact same login behavior after this update. It appeared that some packages were broken and he had to reinstall them.

I second that. Always have a bootable disk ready (or even better a bootable image on your machine) so you can recover from any issues in a snap. Over the course of 20 years using Linux I can only remember two blackscreens. Unlike other OS, these situations don’t happen randomly but mostly when the user mess up with the system (like in your case) and that’s great opportunities to learn a lot about your system because that’s when you really need to understand how it works.

The general idea is that a desktop environment provides you with common graphical user interface elements such as icons, toolbars, wallpaper, and desktop widgets. In other terms it’s purely an aesthetic question. You can also decide which of these features will be useful to you and install the appropriate package(s) if you don’t want to grab the bundle that comes with any DE.

As far of timing is concerned, you can always experiment and install what you need as you go. The only downside to wait will depend on how good your distro is in managing packages dependencies.

Personaly, my Linux journey made me realize that the features offer by a DE were actually negatively impacting my productivity and a windows manager (a tiling one for me) was all I needed. But this decision - like a lot of others - comes down to personal tastes. Note that not using a DE doesn’t mean relying on the terminal only.

A somehow old (2021) but interesting article about why the community is moving from wpa-supplicant to iwd: https://www.linux-magazine.com/Issues/2021/243/iNet-Wireless-Daemon

Here is an excerpt of interest: “The description of the iwd project on www.kernel.org highlights simplicity as an important factor behind iwd’s recent rise: “The core goal of the project is to optimize resource utilization: storage, runtime memory, and link-time costs. This is accomplished by not depending on any external libraries and utilizing features provided by the Linux Kernel to the maximum extent possible. The result is a self-contained environment that only depends on the Linux Kernel and the runtime C library.””

ArchLinux and Ubuntu respectively tested iwd on July 2020 and in Ubuntu 20.10.

I’ve been through awesomewm, i3, and dwm. Now I’m using bspwm. Each one has its own specificities and is more or less easy to familiarized with.

Tiling WM are more than screen splitters. It’s difficult to apprehend without trying it. A friend of mine had the same reasoning before actually trying one. Now he couldn’t go back. Although, like everything else, tiling WM are not for everyone and that’s why there’re other options :)

You’ll soon join the dark side of minimalism where neither tabs nor stacks are an option. That’s where tiling WM push you eventually ;) I use librewolf (fork of Firefox) with no bars whatsoever so I can benefit of the entire screen space to show me what matters: the content. I’ve coupled it with the tridactyl extension for a lot of reasons, one being that it can show me the list of tabs with a keybinding (simply pressing “T” in my case).

Welcome :) Any feedback is much appreciated. I love sharing with people (that’s actually why I have this blog for).