

It’s getting encoded. % is a special character in URIs. Let me try posting it inside of back ticks, as well as triple back ticks:
https://noai.duckduckgo.com/?q=%s
https://noai.duckduckgo.com/?q=%s
I’ve noticed that there’s a plague of threadiverse clients which improperly escape/encode URIs. It’s most evident with how they mangle parenthesis in Wikipedia article titles.







If you want extreme flexibility, use Arch Linux, since it makes it trivial to swap out which window manager you’re using. It sounds like you’re familiar with Linux at this point, so you probably have the requisite knowledge to give Arch a spin.
Niri is supposed to be a pretty interesting WM if you’re looking for something new. I’d be interested to hear why i3 was too much, since I found it to be pretty smooth to pick up.