Debian... The initial reason I switched from Debian to Ubuntu was that Ubuntu included non-free drivers out of the box.
Up to Debian 8, I tried it on the desktop on every major release. And every time my wifi did not work out of the box. So I would have to get a cable to finish the installation or make some extra medium with the non-free drivers. And then I'm "Nahh... I'll stick with a distro that has the non-free drivers included right away".
I have not tried Debian 9 yet.
I'm a happy Linux Mint user. I've used every major OS in the last 30 years, and that's the one I like the most. There will be a new release soon based on Ubuntu 18.04.
People seem to forget that Ubuntu is just the front door. You can totally turn all their crap off, run some other window manager, and avoid all the turdburgers.
True fact, the only reason it is that way is you didn't do something about it. If you want to argue about the reasons behind it being a default, thats one thing.
But please, for the sake of those of us who use Ubuntu- and its derivatives on a daily basis, please do not sally the water with piss-taking .. you most certainly do not have to stay at the front door.
soo... run debian?
The issue is trust. I don't like my companies trying dark patterns on me, even if it's in ToS.
Your problem is that you viewed it as an internal search, when it was designed and advertised as a global search.
If you want to argue that the global search should have been an internal search, that's fine. If you imply that the search was an internal search, though, then that's misleading FUD.
No it was not. There were Lenses that were advertised as non-local searches, yes, but the main Lens was (to my recollection) not one of them.
What actually happened was that Canonical took the main search bar (which had traditionally been designed to search for local files and programs) and stuck Amazon search results in it. Then, when users (like myself) recommended the reasonable approach of "just stick the Amazon stuff in a dedicated Shopping Lens and leave the main Lens for local searches like it was before", Shuttleworth and friends doubled down.
Before that point, I was a happy Ubuntu user who - though I liked Gnome2 a lot - was at least willing to use Unity. After that point, I stopped using Ubuntu entirely and started my quest to find a new distro (Mint → Debian → Fedora → Gentoo → Arch → Slackware → Debian again → openSUSE → Slackware).
The label got changed to "Search your computer and online sources". I believe this was after a few iterations. I don't remember the original text, but I think it's clear that there was no intention to mislead users.
Mint defaulted DNS server to OpenDNS.
Since then, I'm a happy Linux Mint user.
And since we are talking about Linux distros: I tried a bunch of times to live with a distro that has no start bar at the bottom. Even after a few weeks my productivity does not recover. It's a mistery to me how you can live without it. I happily stick with the Mate desktop which has it.