"Nearly impossible" is quite a stretch. While it was certainly shameful that it ever became as mainstream as it did, it was a matter of unticking checkboxes in the adware installers, and there was plenty of software out there that did not engage in that behaviour to begin with. At any rate, I didn't say anything about operating systems. You can also install software of your choice on Linux or Mac. I'm not really sure what point you were driving at there.