That is really good news, so they finally change from a parasitic relationship to a contributing one! This is a win for open source, even though many people like to paint red hat as the bad guy here.
Swaylock, but the one with effects. Using it to leave a blurred picture of the current screen without anything readable. Works well for two years now, is wayland only
First of all, the settings: you can boot up a Manjaro machine and copy the .config/sway/config and whatever other files it might be referencing (another config in /etc maybe?). Then it is just a matter of installing the dependencies like the referenced themes and tools(= any programs listed for shortcuts) in there and you should be able to get the same setup, unless Manajro people set GTK themes outside of sway or sth... Feel free to comment once you hit that wall :)
As to why Manjaro is widely criticized: they delay all updates by some time for a false sense of stability (I think two weeks) which is often considered to make no sense since it delays bugs, but also their fixes. Then there is some general philosophical disagreement between them and the Arch community since Manajro breaks Arch's DIY and learning principles by being ready to use out of the box. This is mainly because they include all kinds of stuff which also makes the distro considered bloated.
In the end, one big advice to give right from the start: searching for help in Arch forums as a Manjaro user is rarely tolerated, if you run Arco, your problem will likely be accepted though.
You're on the right track regarding SMART, most USB-cases do not support it (I think they cannot even since it needs direct SATA connection?).
You should definitely check these values though, so connecting it to some desktop machine through SATA and then checking the values would be my advice. No need for any file system access to do this, so no decryption necessary.
It's not just that they fight ad blockers now. I used to use an auto skipper for the ads, since I am technically okay with being served the ads (dedicated browser, deletion of cookies) and I consider 20 seconds before a video bearable.
They changed the skip button now so that my skipper stopped working. Guess what, now I'm using a blocker instead since I cannot be bothered to constantly click on the fricking screen to prevent 30 min ads from playing.
As someone who games exclusively (okay, except fucking PUBG) on Linux and Wayland for two years now, I find the implicit claim that (x)Wayland would not be suitable for Linux pretty misleading. The problem is that this is repeated a lot throughout the community, mainly by people who haven't tried it recently.
However, good for the few people that need that feature!
That is really good news, so they finally change from a parasitic relationship to a contributing one! This is a win for open source, even though many people like to paint red hat as the bad guy here.
Cudos to Alma for this decision.