Very welcome step. User privacy should be of utmost importance for all GNU/Linux distros. Unfortunately, users of Ubuntu are subjected to privacy intruding malware (that sends their queries to Amazon). Its about time the distros followed GNOME's step and override Firefox's default search engine to DDG as well.
"User privacy should be of utmost importance for all GNU/Linux distros."
Why? It's a feature which takes a large amount of work to implement, has a series of poor tradeoffs, won't actually increase the size of the user base much, is incredibly hard to do well and is very hard to market to users. Not to mention the fact that a large number of GNU/Linux distros are aimed at markets where such user land improvements are largely immaterial (e.g. on servers).
The simple fact is that most users don't care about privacy in the same sense that DDG cares about privacy. If they did, then there would be a huge economic incentive for everyone to make these sorts of changes.
In light of the recent leaks, there is a rising consensus that privacy protection should not be underestimated. If it is, then it is prone to put to use by a third party without taking any permission from the end-user, which is unethical. This is all the more important in the open-source world because many people use open-source products because of their ethical and 'open' paradigms. Proprietary code by their very nature bind us to their whims, but open-source is all about freedom.
Even if your hypothesis is true, ie even if most users don't take privacy very seriously today, I bet it is pretty soon going to change.
I'm a new Ubuntu user who's not super savvy but am considerinng moving to another distro due to these malware issues. Which distro would you recommend I move to? Mint?
The easiest thing would be to just turn off the internet search option from the dash, or maybe uninstall the Amazon lens (but maybe there are other similar lenses...). Or change from Unity to another Desktop Environment (Gnome, Xfce, KDE, Cinnamon or whatever).
Unless you want to make a statement, then changing the distro might be the gesture you want.
Don't be fooled by the FUD. It's easy to turn off and not that big a deal, but people who are already biased against Ubuntu like to use this to try to scare folks away.
Yup, it's easy to remove that specific functionality. But let's think of the big picture. The introduction of this privacy-violating functionality signifies the direction of Ubuntu as a whole.
I highly, highly recommend Linux Mint (with Cinnamon) to those looking for an Ubuntu alternative. Cinnamon is a great desktop environment and Mint, in many ways, is Ubuntu without the privacy issues.
I'm not entirely sure how the upgrade process works in Mint. I think of it as a "transition" distro in many ways. Most of the people I've recommended it to moved on to Crunchbang or similar after a few months of use.
Depends, I guess. I'd check out Debian and maybe, yes, Mint.
The thing to realize is that you can use any kind of desktop environment on any of the main distros. With Ubuntu, moving from its default DE can sometimes result in certain hiccups. Other distros are more DE-modular; that's the feeling I get when working on a Debian desktop, at least.
Overall, Debian is a very user-friendly system (or rather, it exposes the same kinds of interfaces as Ubuntu does, once the leaky UI abstractions in Ubuntu do start leaking. ;)
