That was not my experience when I tried Windows 8. Within the first hour it had offered to sell me Microsoft Office, a DVD decoder, an anti-virus program and several other apps.
I didn’t see any of that %$^ on Mint.
Is that because Mint doesn’t use Unity?
I have nothing against Mint except the problems that have been reported with its Audacity packages and the extra hoops if you want to compile Audacity. I know this is better than it used to be.
I honestly don’t know where the ads were coming from on Windows 8 if not from search suggestions. If you search “Everywhere” you should get local files or apps first, then web results underneath as plain text links. The web result links are explicitly not presented as ads (but are ads - with prices - in Ubuntu). You may get the Bing results “tailored” a bit unless you set the results not to be customised.
So my response is - If you don’t want to open the web results, don’t click on the links. If you don’t want web results to be listed, turn them off, or search only for “Files” or “Settings”.
But if/when there is a free Windows as expected, it will of course be ad-supported.
Gale