> I credit my operating system to Canonical, even though the heavy lifting and behaving nicely on hardware is done by people contributing to Linux. Linux out of the box doesn't mean a thing to me. Bing out of the box doesn't mean a thing to me. DDG and Ubuntu do mean a lot to me.
That's a dangerous comparison to make because there isn't really any consensus* on which part of the stack to name the OS. For example, Linux is technically just the kernel. So most of the UX you deal with will be GNU and other user space tools. Depending on the DE you use, you might not even deal with much of Canonical's code. And Ubuntu does owe an awful lot to it's parent distribution, Debian.
In short, I get the point you're attempting to make but unfortunately your comparison is more contested than the original subject you were discussing.
Canonical did a good thing of mashing it all together into a single product. DDG does the same for search in my book.
They've both outsourced the heavy lifting to some third party.
In DDG, Bing/Yahoo/Yandex does all of the heavy lifting. In Ubuntu, it's the Linux kernel. They would be nothing without those products they depend on. But they bundle that with like hundreds of different, smaller in scale products to offer a nice experience out of the box.
For smaller in scale companies that are trying to compete with big players (like Microsoft and Google), this does seem like a winning combination in my book.
That's a dangerous comparison to make because there isn't really any consensus* on which part of the stack to name the OS. For example, Linux is technically just the kernel. So most of the UX you deal with will be GNU and other user space tools. Depending on the DE you use, you might not even deal with much of Canonical's code. And Ubuntu does owe an awful lot to it's parent distribution, Debian.
In short, I get the point you're attempting to make but unfortunately your comparison is more contested than the original subject you were discussing.
* though many do advocate GNU/Linux