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.