X11 window manager using the Penrose library written in Rust Language

      Since I began using Linux as my main OS sometime around 1998, I have always enjoyed trying out the many X11 window managers along with hacking on them or creating my own.

     Recently, I discovered on Github an X11 window manager library written in Rust language called Penrose.   Having played around with Rust a few times, I decided to see if using this library would make it easier to create a customized tiling window manager.   I found Penrose to be very well documented and in just a few hours I was able to put together a fully functional tiling window manager that is minimal and stable written in 100% Rust language.

     I named it MPWM for My Penrose Window Manager.  I like the Penrose idea about making a library in a solid system level language that allows others to customize rather than everyone trying to write their own window managers from scratch.  It gives the power of other programming language window managers such as Xmonad or Stumpwm but without having to load the full language into memory like with Haskell or Lisp.

    While MPWM is not perfect, there are still features or changes I may make, it's not about the end results for me as much as the journey.  I enjoy the challenge and making my computer work just the way I want.  The ability to change and modify everything in my OS is what keeps me using Linux to this day.

In search of a better Search Engine

     As google have grown they have increasingly turned to more censorship and advertising.  This limits the number of results from a search and also creates less privacy as they are tracking everything you type in for advertising results.

     Due to Googles lack of privacy protection, a couple of newer search engines have emerged.  Duckduckgo being the most popular alternative search engine that claims it is privacy focused.  However, there have been recent news about censorship on this search engine along with information about them using Bing as a backend, which leads to questions about whether they are much better than Google.

     Due to Duckduckgo's questionable privacy, a new search engine by the creators of the Brave browser has emerged.  Brave Search claims it is "the world’s most complete, independent, private search engine".   I have used it now for a few months and it seems to be fast and provides good results, however how much privacy it provides has yet to be determined.    The Brave browser is based on Chromium but offers settings to enhance privacy on the web, I have used it a number of times along with my favorite browser Ungoogled-Chromium which is just Chromium minus Googles extra spying stuff.  It's not as easy to install and upgrade as other Browsers but I think it worth it.

     So in short, I use Ungoogled-chromium browser with Brave Search as my default search engine which has to be manually set up in Settings but no-one said trying to maintain some privacy on the web was going to be easy.   Enjoy!