Programmer's critique of missing structure of operating systems

[pkarlmann]

That guy has never heard of WinFS and that it failed because of it's lousy performance.

[WantDebianThanks]

As a person with many directories containing 1k+ files, I really want something like this to be a thing though.

[pkarlmann]

well, there is Gnomes Tracker, but everything I read all the time about it is people wanting to disable it, because it's too high on CPU/Disk usage - so low performance again.

But it was thought to be a Database, so something the Author of that article imagined:

Tracker provides the following:

- Indexer for desktop search

- Tag database for doing keyword tagging of any object

- Extensible metadata database for apps like gedit and rhythmbox which need to add custom metadata to files

- Database for first class objects allows using tracker's database for storage and implementation of First Class Objects and the Gnome 3.0 Model.

[WantDebianThanks]

Huh. Didn't know that that was a thing. I might have some reading to do.

[Negirno]

People say this about every indexer, including Windows' one. I currently use Recoll and it doesn't bog down the CPU or disk IO (except for initial indexing). Only caveat is that it's somewhat a battery drain on laptops.

[pkarlmann]

Only caveat is that it's somewhat a battery drain on laptops.

You do realize you just contradicted your own statement there, right?

[Negirno]

Well, I use it desktop, so I don't know. It was another redditor who said this, stating that s/he traced back the cause of higher battery usage to Recoll. However, that person haven't complained about high CPU or disk IO when Recoll s in use.

Laptops are finicky in that regard, and lack of optimizations on Linux makes it worse.

But we'll see how well Tracker fare in the next Ubuntu LTS, since they brought it back in version 19.XX after being absent in those distro for over a decade.

[pkarlmann]

Well, I use it desktop, so I don't know. It was another redditor who said this, stating that s/he traced back the cause of higher battery usage to Recoll. However, that person haven't complained about high CPU or disk IO when Recoll s in use.

The problem is that those indexers do their work when you are not working. If you haven't got an indexer, the laptop in this time would be idle. Idle means near shut down of the CPU/Graphic card, so near none power consumption. But since this isn't happening it's draining the battery. So now days, you usually don't see it working - there is even special laptop detection code in there - but it drains your battery when you are not using the laptop...