Hacker News Reader

Comment by zobzu | Hacker News Reader

hmm I use KDE (latest) with indexing disabled, akonadi disabled, 3d desktop effects disabled

it seems very similar to LXQt and the project it replaces when it comes to resource usage and useability, except it is more mature and support a few more things.

Thats basically what keeps me on KDE. I would think KDE should disable akonadi and stuff by default personally - its super useable without all the heavy weight "crap".

Alt-F2, konsole and kwin basically are the reasons I use it.

Here's an example, too: I can tile my windows on any desktop i want with kwin without sacrificing non-tiling windows. I can even mix tiling and non-tiling. I dont have to remember 20 shortcuts for this, it works with the mouse too. Basically, its seamless.

(Thats also why I use it over awesomewm for example)

View on HN

> I would think KDE should disable akonadi and stuff by default personally - its super useable without all the heavy weight "crap".

I agree. Unfortunately, they replaced Nepomuk with Baloo in 4.13 (I think; Baloo seems more aggressive than the former) and have effectively taken the stance that users cannot (easily) disable it [1]. It's somewhat infuriating, because adding your home to the ignore list doesn't appear to work as advertised and it'll happily index everything including /var (bug?), NFS mounts, and anything it gets its grubby mitts on. The only solution I found that works is here [2] because there's no longer a UI to disable it (unlike Nepomuk). Beyond that, you're absolutely right: With all the cruft disabled, KDE is quite nice (long time user here as well).

That said, I'm happy with KDE, and I enjoy it in part because of the eye candy (probably a poor excuse). I've used LXDE on an old laptop before but there are always features that I seem to miss. Otherwise, it's great for users looking to avoid the cruft or have limited resources. LXQt brings some of the clean appearance of modern KDE with it, so that's a definite plus. It makes me eager to take it a spin, then possibly try it out on that old laptop--which doesn't play nicely with KDE no matter what's disabled.

[1] http://vhanda.in/blog/2014/04/desktop-search-configuration/

[2] https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=1390267#p1390267

From your first link:

"There is no explicit “Enable/Disable” button any more. We would like to promote the use of searching and feel that Baloo should never get in the users way. However, we are smart about it and IF you add your HOME directory to the list of “excluded folders”, Baloo will switch itself off since it no longer has anything to index."

This philosophy is why I stopped using GNOME and now prefer Xfce. I'm looking forward to trying LXQt when it's more stable.

Yeah, the developer has a really strange take on indexing. I got into a bit of an argument about it with him on a bug tracker. Baloo had decided that it would index all of my data files which are huge (multiple GB) which was going poorly for it and for me. The system is a wrapper around Xapian (http://xapian.org/) and Sqlite, as with any full text index when you try and put things which are huge into the index it is going to explode the index. Which is what happened to me. It also indexes source code which is fairly useless. (Although to be fair they have (today) blacklisted source code https://projects.kde.org/projects/kde/kdelibs/baloo/reposito... )

EDIT: looks like 4.13.1 will also have a check box to disable Baloo! https://projects.kde.org/projects/kde/kdelibs/baloo/reposito... which is great news.

> EDIT: looks like 4.13.1 will also have a check box to disable Baloo!

FINALLY. Thanks for digging this up. Having no means of presently disabling it through the UI seems unnecessarily user-hostile.

> Baloo had decided that it would index all of my data files which are huge (multiple GB) which was going poorly for it and for me.

As I mentioned in my previous comment, Baloo seemed to happily go about its business indexing precisely everything I told it not to, even to the extent of ignoring child directories of those I specified in the ignored directory list. I suspect that was a bug, but considering the suggestion in lieu of a button to disable the feature was "just add your home directory and it'll do the right thing" (which didn't work) is counter productive.

Sigh.

I can understand being excited about a new feature and (possibly) being one of its only proponents, and occasionally something good surfaces from such thankless chores. But I sometimes have to wonder what the motivation is to staunchly defend decisions that seem rather... myopic. Ordinarily I wouldn't care, but pounding the heck out of partitions and NFS mounts to do something that I can do quickly and simply with grep and find is just insanity.

On the other hand, now I understand why xapian-core is listed as a dependency.

I remember when I first switched to kde 4.0 and everything slowed to a crawl because some background process (nepomuk) thought it was a good idea to index the whole filesystem.

KDE4 has much improved since 4.0 regardless. much.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com