WHO ARE WE?
We are a bunch of volunteers trying to make everyone aware that the game we play (Game of Trade) is creating most of today’s problems: from corruption to violence, hunger to bad products, data collection to privacy invasion, human made climate change to waste, and so forth. It simply throws people into a Monopoly-kind of game where everyone has to “trade”: do something to obtain something else. This imbalance of power between those who need/want and those who have/provide makes human beings behave very badly (hoard resources, waste, create poor quality products, lie, deceive, abuse, etc.). We explain in detail, and well sourced, all of this line of thinking and solutions to combat this primitive type of society, on www.tromsite.com, since 2011.
We’re not only creating awareness about this issue, but we create solutions (as much as we can). The antidote for a Trade-Based society, is a Trade-Free society, and we are creating trade-free goods and services. In today’s world the notion of “free” has lost all of its meaning. FaceBook proclaims to be “free” but they collect your data in order to let you use their service; YouTube shoves ads into your face and proclaims to be “free”; Android is a promoter for Google products and labels itself in the same manner. These are money-free, cryptocurrency-free, and so forth, but NOT trade-free. They want something from you (a trade, such as your data or attention).
When something is trade-free, it means it wants nothing from its “users”. Like no collection of data, no wanting for people’s attention or currency, and so forth. This is the purest form of free and the most honest one.
WHY CUSTOMIZE MANJARO?
WHAT EXACTLY DID WE CHANGE?
- We have built a Layout Switcher for XFCE, that allows anyone to quickly switch between 6 different layouts.
- We have built our own Theme Switcher for XFCE: 10 accent colors, light/dark variants. Unlike any theme switcher that we are aware of, this one is able to apply our TROMjaro themes to pretty much all of the Linux apps out there (QT, GTK, GTK + LIbadwaita, Flatpaks). And work properly with them.
- We’ve applied the same fixes for the entire XFCE desktop for themes and icons – meaning, when you select a theme and an icon set, it will apply across multiple types of packages, unlike pretty much any distro out there.
- We have integrated and enabled the Chaotic-AUR repository.
- We ship with a lot of hand-picked Wallpapers that are more or less unique to our distro.
- We co-create the default TROMjaro icon pack, and therefore we make hundreds of custom icons for TROMjaro.
- We have enabled Global Menus and HUD.
- We added a lot more options for the Settings Manager, such as the ability to configure touchpad/mouse gestures, RGB lights, system and files backup, webcam, added a system cleaner and a lot more. Therefore a more complete set of Settings.
- We added gestures for mouse, touchpad and touchscreen.
- We test TROMjaro on touchscreen devices too, and optimize for that. For example we ship with a customized Virtual Keyboard.
- We enabled Flatpaks and AUR, plus we have our own small repository. Thus, users have full access to pretty much all apps that are available in Linux, from the get-go.
- We added support for Appimages.
- TROMjaro creates a system backup automatically every time there are important updates.
- We made sure that pretty much all common files (video, audio, documents, images) are opened with properly tested apps from the get-go. Meaning, you do nor have to worry about your files. Double click them and they simply work. We also added support for .torrents files.
- We ship with a heavily tweaked Firefox. We have removed most annoyances and trackers from Firefox, plus added a handful of addons and set them up, so that users will be protected from the online trades (ads and trackers are removed, alongside promotional content from youtube videos). Users can also save webpages or media files from Firefox directly.
- We’ve added a few unique and useful apps to TROMjaro, like a trade-free VPN, a simple file sharing app, messenger, and so forth.
- We added custom internet searches directly from the system’s menu. One can search via maps, images, videos, and so much more.
- Lastly, we have our own web app library – we test thousands of apps and add only the trade-free ones to our library. TROMjaro users can directly install any of them from the website itself.