I use the closest one to me from searx.space. I suppose hosting an instance yourself will give you the best response times, but it always still takes a moment while it searches through multiple search engines. If you only care about the results of one engine (e.g. google) then you could disable the others. Might speed it up a bit.

I didn't know that, very useful. I suppose this is only for using other search engines like google, bing, etc... right?

Or can it also search immediately on other websites like metacritic, rotten tomatoes by using bangs?

So what are these exactly? An alternative to www/http websites? Are there any specific 'websites' or features that make it worth it to use something like this? (over TOR for example)

Hyprland seems pretty popular these days. I want to use it (or sway) but didn’t have the chance to figure out how to run it with my nvidia card

Yeah. He even has a server rack at home. But still uses windows for all his devices. Luckily he’s not crazy enough to run windows server.