https://lwn.net/Articles/490517/
The Debian project is considering a proposal from the DuckDuckGo search engine to accept a percentage of the engine's advertising revenue that originates from web browsers on Debian machines.
Above is from 2012...
https://www.mail-archive.com/debian-devel-changes@lists.debian.org/msg760508.html
HN Thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32582260
I had to smile reading parts of that HN thread. Especially the parts about how it should be easy to run an entire web search engine from a single modern desktop computer and a gazillion harddrives from Amazon. Heh.
> Debian
Anything that puts a nail in Google's coffin is good by me. Debian is big, but still small beer compared to Windows or the Appleverse.
So, Debian is huge, but I doubt that there are many Debian desktop users that would leave things default. All the distors based on Debian would probably alter the defaults too. I do think DDG is getting legs though.