Yes, exactly. haha, the distro has nothing to do with the GUI. That’s your Desktop Environment. On almost every single popular distro you can get teh same DE’s either through official offerings or community versions.

I’m working on a home project, so when I search on ddg for “how to build raised garden boxes” I get some “shopping” links with the word “ads” right next to it clearly visible, which I instantly skip over, then two text results labeled clearly as “ads” then the actual results. One text result is a sales pitch for a premade garden box and the other is a link to a video instruction (which I’m assuming will also have a sales pitch) so I can easily skip over those two links and now I’m at the results. No video or sound at all and it’s all labeled as such for me. I’m using a default “dark” theme under the appearance settings.

This is why I whitelist duckduckgo in firefox in my ublock extension. I will gladly look at the relevant ads at the top of the list, knowing they are just that. I glance at them, most of the time it’s a sales pitch, I go “not interested” and just move down the page to the results. 100% fine with that.

I hadn’t used searxng before, so I just tried out a search on a couple different instances, and one instance returned absolutely nothing at all “sorry we didn’t find any results” and the other did return results, but kind of average quality results. I did the same search on my daily go to search engine DDG and got high quality helpful results. My query (what I’m hoping to begin tomorrow) “how to build raised garden boxes”. Looks like I’ll be sticking with ddg for now.

Isn’t this the overarching problem with lemmy just in general though? I mean, I’m loving it here, but without GOOD moderation any community, no matter where or how it’s hosted, can become very bad very quickly. I’m not blaming you all at all!! I completely understand where you’re coming from, but this is the same scaling issues that mastadon faces right? Is there any idea about how to address this?