01.06.2020

This time we released a bigger ISO with more updates (mostly coming from the Manjaro Stable branch). Here are the updates/changes that matter the most:

• • We strive to keep a very simple desktop with few apps installed by default. But we felt that we were missing two that can be essential for most users: Clocks and Contacts. These two are very simple apps, but can be useful if users need a list of their contacts that will integrate into the desktop (for example connecting with your NextCloud instance, will import contacts into your desktop Contacts). Clocks lets you add multiple clocks from around the world to keep track of different time-zones, or you can set up alarms or have access to a stopwatch. Basic tools.
  • The Default Firefox Search Engine: this one is a big improvement! Instead of using the trade-based DuckDuckGo or other limited search engines, we are now using by default SearX. SearX is an open source search engine that anyone can install on their server. It is as private as you can get and can aggregate searches from many search engines such as google, duckduckgo, yahoo, bing and the like, but it removes any trackers and ads before delivering the results to you. You do not trade to this search engine! Period. The fantastic part is that you can search by categories such as files, news, images or map. Even by ‘science’ in order to find scientific articles. More to that, whenever possible it will open the scientific articles with SciHub or other platforms that break the paywalls of trade. You can tweak this search engine too, any way you want. So, because we cannot add SearX directly into Firefox, we added 10 of the best instances that we tested. You can find a list of these instances here. We added the following instances: https://searx.privatenet.cf/, https://search.snopyta.org/, https://searx.be/, https://search.mdosch.de/, https://searx.tuxcloud.net/, https://searx.ninja/, https://searx.info/, https://searx.rasp.fr/, https://searx.decatec.de/, https://search.disroot.org/. We used the Firefox Addon ‘Add Custom Search Engine’ to add them and since that Addon is installed on TROMjaro’s Firefox, it means that you can add any instance on top of those. Simply click the Addon (search icon) in Firefox and follow the simple instructions. The best thing is that now you have 10 search engines, and all are the same, and all are fast and smart and trade-free. And independent from each other. If one doesn’t work, you can use the other one. When you type in Firefox’s URL bar to search for something, you will see 10 small search icons bellow that. If you click any, it will open with the selected SearX instance. If you just hit enter, it will use the default SearX instance that is set up in Firefox. This is finally a long term solution for TROMjaro’s default Search Engine and we are so happy with it.
  • We removed Font Finder from the pre-installed apps since it is using the Google Fonts. Despite the fact that we still consider this a trade-free application, it is not as “pure” as to include it by default with TROMjaro. But anyone can install it from our apps library.
  • We replaced the default cursor theme with the Breeze theme. Previous users can simply install it and replace it from the Tweaks. We are using this cursor because it fits better with our desktop theme and it has better visibility on multiple types of backgrounds.
  • We added the package ‘hardcode-fixer‘ so that in the future some apps that do not play well with custom icons, will play well with custom icons. And the package ‘manjaro-zsh-config‘.

There are two known bugs with this ISO that are easy to get around: when you first boot into the Live ISO or after you install TROMjaro, the extension Unite does not load. This extension removes the top bar of apps’ windows when they are maximized. The other bug is that Firefox does not load all of the Addons when you first open it. Both can be easily fixed with a restart of the desktop: press ALT + F2, write ‘r’ and then press enter. Or restart the computer. Or close Firefox and open it again. We do not know why these are happening but they do not persist. It is only an issue when you first boot after the installation.

Not related to the ISO itself, but you can now subscribe to receive email updates whenever we release a new ISO or via RSS.