[eball]

Adware goes to where there are a lot of non tech savvy users. If desktop Linux gets more traction, you'll see such search hijacking on there too. Note that this story is about search hijacking on OS X, not Windows.

[chii]

exactly. As soon as there are many users, people who intend to "monetize" starts creeping in, and they are always mighty powerful.

[simias]

The use of a package manager/app store might help prevent that though. They won't be able to bundle crapware in their installers.

[Xylakant]

How? Every package manager that I've seen so far allows installations of locally downloaded packages. Some will even helpfully download all dependencies. That's a good thing in general, however, the package could just as well contain adware/spyware. And every package format that I know of supports post-install scripts, those could easily change configuration settings. Since package install runs as root that added layer of security doesn't help here.