The point was not about avoiding or getting rid of the "bloat/crapware". The poster above me claimed that you won't find "bloat/crapware" in an open-source os and I was just pointing out that with Ubuntu's recent changes, it is not the case anymore.

That wasn't exactly my point. My point was that the bloatware/crapware problem in Windows has gotten so out of hand that MS had to do something and that something was to start tightening up who can ship software for the platform.

Of course there is nothing stopping people shipping crapware for Ubuntu or any Linux distro. The advantage of open source OSs is that you will always have a choice about how much "nannying" you want from the OS.

And it's also quite trivial to uninstall the amazon lens. This is the sort of control things like iOS don't give you, and Win8 is stupidly moving in that direction.

I'd prefer not to use a distro with ads on the whole, I had Mint during "special search" and it was not trivial to remove and it did degrade regular searches by a lot. Once bitten...

But this is a great point -- not only does a walled garden keep some flowers out, it keeps some weeds in.