That's an interesting sentiment, because most of the software in the Ubuntu, Debian, and other repositories is largely free yet we don't see this crapware there.

I think the problem is that these applications get to decide what gets installed with them. There's no reason to allow them to make that decision anymore.

You missed the part where Ubuntu was sending search requests to Amazon?

Ubuntu "exists" but it is not "stable" because Canonical, the company that creates the Ubuntu distribution and is losing money [1]. Their efforts at capturing sustainable funding have been largely unsuccessful. So eventually they too will be gone.

[1] http://www.linuxinsider.com/story/74511.html

>You missed the part where Ubuntu was sending search requests to Amazon?

I don't think this is as bad as the other cases.

I actually don't see the difference between Ubuntu's Amazon search bar and a crapware browser toolbar.

In both cases, there are some defenses for it: it's not a terribly big problem, the developer can rationalize it in terms of obscure use cases where someone might actually want to use it, and you can always disable it once you realize it's there.

But in both cases, it's making your computer perform worse, showing you things you never asked for, and possibly breaking your expectations of privacy, just so that the developer can make a trickle of money from you.

The "crapware browser toolbar" is a browser add-on that takes extra time to load on startup, for one thing.