Hi, i am user and contributor of KDE, i have used KDE since 2001.
After the announcement that baloo will take the place of Nepomuk i was satisfied as I've never used nepomuk and because the problems that made (eg: search while typing a contact in kmail) i have it permanently disabled.

Now with baloo, i realized that i don't really need it as i use recoll, and also it doesn't find messages in Greek language.
I wanted to remove it from my system but it is a dependency of kmail so it is impossible:
"kmail: error while loading shared libraries: libbaloopim.so.4: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory"
I tried to disable it but i couldn't as i didn't find a such option in systemsettings
I was really disappointed as in KDE i am used to customize my system as i want and not to be forced to use things (as doing in other desktops)
I don't want to use baloo, and i don't want to spend my life filling bugs as i did with nepomuk, i just don't want to have it in my system.

I'm following the Planet KDE and i read this article:
http://vhanda.in/blog/2014/04/desktop-s ... iguration/
from the baloo's developer Vishesh Handa

I wrote a comment and i expressed the above opinion but he deleted my comment
This, and his answers below, confirms the topic's title

[...]you could just uninstall it.

[...]Why would you want to disable temporary indexing?[...]

Please trust the developers to keep sensible defaults.

I'm surprised that you're under the impression that 80% of the users don't want it.

How do you expect non-technical users to search for files? You may be using mlocate, but that doesn't mean the majority will be

...and he knows about recoll (jealousy?) as he deleted my comment where i mentioned it...

It is unacceptable to not respect users, this is not the KDE philosophy, i am very disappointed. It is the third time in my KDE experience that i have this feeling (Amarok, Nepomuk, Baloo)

It is clear and easy to understand that he wants to force/impose the usage of baloo from any KDE user !

Agreed. In the current state it is useless for any data set that is big enough and contains non-ASCII data.

Having an option that does exactly what Vishesh mean by disabling (ban ~/ directory) would be a reasonable solution for those to whom the power consumption and hardware resource are worth.

I understand your frustration, but please don't turn this into a witchhunt. Please edit your topic title and the contents to be within the and Code of Conduct, or your post will be removed. As it is now it's just an non-constructive rant.

A more constructive approach would be to write about your use case and why you would want to disable Baloo. Many users had bad experiences with Nepomuk and want to disable indexing for that reason. My guess is that the developers want to make Baloo as lean and "stay out of the way" as possible, so that there is no need to disable it. If we assume that Baloo works perfectly, why would you want to disable it? (This isn't a rhetoric question; answering it may give the developers more insight into why some people don't want Baloo.)

Hans wrote:If we assume that Baloo works perfectly, why would you want to disable it? (This isn't a rhetoric question; answering it may give the developers more insight into why some people don't want Baloo.)

1. I have a really huge collection of papers and almost full KDE sources (needed for documenting KDE) in my $HOME. It takes some minutes after every restart of the system for Baloo to spin the hard drive trying to find some new files. I do not want this because neither Dolphin in the current state nor KRunner can find almost anything useful with Baloo anyway. Proprietary solution (Mendeley) or FOSS KFind/Krusader do not have this problem, it indexes/searches when I want it only in a reasonable time.

2. My native language (Ukrainian) is written in Cyrillic. Nepomuk/Baloo cannot index or search in anything but ASCII data. So it is useless to find something in Ukrainian without clear labeling using Semantic Search.

Please do not get me wrong, I only want a clear GUI option to switch off indexing at once. Nothing more. Just to save some power and make the world better.

Hans wrote:I understand your frustration, but please don't turn this into a witchhunt. Please edit your topic title and the contents to be within the and Code of Conduct, or your post will be removed. As it is now it's just an non-constructive rant.

I read the both links but i realy don't see where is the problem. I think you confuse the word 'dictator' as a directly caracterisation of the person but it is not. It is a charactarisation to describe the philosophy (Don't give the possibility to disable it, forcing the usage and the installation as related product of kmail, dolphin, konqueror - you cannot use them after uninstalling baloo). And after my comment was deleted in his blog with out mention the word dictator or something non respectfull.
Is it the word dictator that conflicts with the code of conduct, even if it is not addressed to a person but to a philisophy (a way of thinking, a politic etc, in a specific case)?
What should i remove in the content of my post ?
And finaly the title is for the program :
'Baloo has a dictator's philosophy' , it says baloo.
If i say Windows has a dictator's philosophy is it ok for you ?

A more constructive approach would be to write about your use case and why you would want to disable Baloo. Many users had bad experiences with Nepomuk and want to disable indexing for that reason. My guess is that the developers want to make Baloo as lean and "stay out of the way" as possible, so that there is no need to disable it. If we assume that Baloo works perfectly, why would you want to disable it? (This isn't a rhetoric question; answering it may give the developers more insight into why some people don't want Baloo.)

I have many reasons but just 'i don't want to use it' is n't enough ? does it conflicts with any freedom philosophy where is supposed to belong KDE ?

If I recall correctly there is an option to disable indexing completely. It doesn't affect the file monitor though - which may be the cause of your problems possibly.

In regards to non-Latin1 characters, have you verified that Baloo is unable to handle them? Whilst this defect may have existed with the Nepomuk/Virtuoso stack, Baloo is substantially different - please try before assuming the same issue still exists.

@yurchor: For the papers and the KDE sources, I would suggest excluding them from indexing - hopefully this will avoid the needless disk activity on login.

@Dimitrios: Even when addressed against Baloo, it still harms people - as there are people who built Baloo and are invested in it. The Code of Conduct governs not only communication towards individuals, but also groups and the projects they create - in essence everything which is part of the KDE Community and is a product of it. It also governs the interactions between our community and others.

I would suggest commenting on how the specific behaviours Baloo demonstrates cause problems, and providing suggestions on how to fix them.

Changed the thread title to something more descriptive.

I don't want to use baloo, and i don't want to spend my life filling bugs as i did with nepomuk, i just don't want to have it in my system.

I understand your frustration, but please bear in mind that unless bugs are filed, issues will not be solved. While not all bugs filed will be fixed, not filing bugs is instead a guaranteed way to keep issues unresolved.

Early versions of the new indexing stack went through a lot of "growing pains": most were fixed due to prompt reporting. Also, as the posters above mentioned, statements such as this are a huge motivation sap for whoever works in FOSS.

bcooksley wrote:If I recall correctly there is an option to disable indexing completely. It doesn't affect the file monitor though - which may be the cause of your problems possibly.

In regards to non-Latin1 characters, have you verified that Baloo is unable to handle them? Whilst this defect may have existed with the Nepomuk/Virtuoso stack, Baloo is substantially different - please try before assuming the same issue still exists.

@yurchor: For the papers and the KDE sources, I would suggest excluding them from indexing - hopefully this will avoid the needless disk activity on login.

@Dimitrios: Even when addressed against Baloo, it still harms people - as there are people who built Baloo and are invested in it. The Code of Conduct governs not only communication towards individuals, but also groups and the projects they create - in essence everything which is part of the KDE Community and is a product of it. It also governs the interactions between our community and others.

I would suggest commenting on how the specific behaviours Baloo demonstrates cause problems, and providing suggestions on how to fix them.

No. There is no option to disable it (and that's all about this). Vishesh proposed to add "~/" and all other possible sources that should not be indexed to the ban list. This is not that obvious.

Personally, I know how to disable it (the most ingenious things, like radio, are easy in switching them off ).

And some more testing:

Intel Core Duo E4700, 4GB of RAM, stock Kubuntu 14.04, KDE 4.13 from generic USB flash drive. I enabled Semantic Search for my hard drive (Seagate ST3500412AS, 500GB, mostly videos, but I have added ~100MB of text files). ~20 mins of intensive drive reading, then ~20 mins of 50% CPU load. As a result nothing new is found. This is not very impressive for such a resource hog. Yes, it is of magnitudes lower than NEPOMUK (congratulations, very impressive, it takes several hours for NEPOMUK/virtuoso to do this!), but the result... Almost nothing changed since NEPOMUK epoch. Dolphin search capabilities are still unusable.

To the developers: this "google for your local drive" concept has very limited applications. I agree that it looks exciting, there is no doubt for this. But... Please do not install rocket jet on the ordinary car if there is no need for this. Please add option to disable Semantic Search service if needed.

Hi,

Lurker here, decided to pitch in for once.

First of all, I have the utmost respect for KDE developers and for the entire community. Baloo developers included. I have been using KDE for the past 7 years or so, and am very grateful for it.

One dominant reason for my staying (and probably many others') is the amount of freedom and features. I know I can trust KDE to allow me to customize the smallest and seemingly insignificant things to my exact liking.

My opinion, like others in the thread, is that being unable to disable Baloo with a simple GUI checkbox is unjustifiable in view of the KDE philosophy. Let me be clear: I'm not complaining about its functionality, or its existence, or anything of the kind. As I said, I have enormous respect for all developers here (and FOSS in general). My claim is simple: pretty much all programs and features of KDE are customizable to an impressive degree, and this shouldn't be an exception.

The reason that we are having this discussion is not that the developer can't or hasn't yet added this basic feature. It's that he doesn't want to.

Unfortunately, since the reason users noticed Baloo was CPU/HDD usage, the discussion became about performance. That's an important issue that should be resolved for the sake of those who want to use indexing in the first place, but it's not the core issue here.

I understand your frustration, but please bear in mind that unless bugs are filed, issues will not be solved. While not all bugs filed will be fixed, not filing bugs is instead a guaranteed way to keep issues unresolved.

Agreed. I would just like to draw readers' attention to this thread and this one, both of which are marked WONTFIX as of this writing. When I couple these with the original post of this thread (that mentions deleted comments), it seems to me that we have a mismatch of visions here. The performance aspect amplifies it, but it's there regardless. When many users ask for a basic, reasonable, easy, non-hacky option, the response "No, because why would you want to?" goes against what we believe in.

Thank you yet again to all FOSS developers and to the entire community.

I don't beleive this:
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=331932
it makes me pain at the stomach (ouuuf...breath...zen)

The problem here is that we are missing a person, a leader, who can take decisions, and maintain the KDE philosophy and policy, to avoid at the future similar behaviour from developers.

Sorry but, i use and contribute to foss because the ethical side of things, i am not a customer.
When you have users you think that you have power and you impose/force things but very easy you can be alone and with no ...funds.
Then you will see a 'disable' checkbox appearing but will be too late...

The problem here is that we are missing a person, a leader, who can take decisions, and maintain the KDE philosophy and policy, to avoid at the future similar behaviour from developers.

As far as my experience goes, FOSS has never been about leadership. While some projects (see e.g. Python) have "benevolent dictators", the landscape is mostly meritocratic (as it should be) or "who codes decides" type.

If you think that the work in Baloo was not done to cater the needs of the users, I would suggest you to stop for a second and think why the migration from RDF to this new storage was done (it was a massive undertaking in both the indexing and the PIM part).

einar wrote:

The problem here is that we are missing a person, a leader, who can take decisions, and maintain the KDE philosophy and policy, to avoid at the future similar behaviour from developers.

As far as my experience goes, FOSS has never been about leadership. While some projects (see e.g. Python) have "benevolent dictators", the landscape is mostly meritocratic (as it should be) or "who codes decides" type.

Yes, it is correct when someone works, to be able to make decisions. For this reason i have the right to criticise, i have worked a lot for KDE as volunteer.
But he can just stop coding if he doesn't respect others.
We have a problem when someone introduce something and after closes the reports us wontfix.
And it has to be taken into account seriously viewing the panic that he has created in our community (a simple google search is enough to realise the scope)

If you think that the work in Baloo was not done to cater the needs of the users, I would suggest you to stop for a second and think why the migration from RDF to this new storage was done (it was a massive undertaking in both the indexing and the PIM part).

Unfortunately we didn't learn from nepomuk. The baloo was made to fix the nepomuk's failure.
The problem is that is mathematicaly sure if it continues in this direction, will have the end of nepomuk.
If for giving a new try we are forced to use it, thanks i will not take.

I don't use a program which doesn't respect me, by principal.

We have allready a nice tool for desktop search, Recoll (with disable capabilities).
Why reinventing the wheel and don't finaly adopt it:
viewtopic.php?f=83&t=107093&p=264302
viewtopic.php?f=83&t=95768&p=198989
viewtopic.php?f=154&t=93845&p=190158
viewtopic.php?f=15&t=97687&p=207075
viewtopic.php?f=154&t=94269&p=247040
viewtopic.php?f=83&t=111315&p=265572

the amount of time and money saving is considerable.
Since years and years we are saying the same things, lets continue for some years more ....

Yes, it is correct when someone works, to be able to make decisions. For this reason i have the right to criticise, i have worked a lot for KDE as volunteer.

No one is denying your right to criticize. But please remember that it works both ways, meaning you criticism can be criticized.

And it has to be taken into account seriously viewing the panic that he has created in our community (a simple google search is enough to realise the scope)

The degree of a perceived impact tells nothing about its truthfulness. What makes me wonder is that why no one even complained during the beta cycle: this feature was present right from the start (check the sticky post in the Semantic Desktop session). I'm guessing that no one bothered to test, or report bugs.

We have a problem when someone introduce something and after closes the reports us wontfix.

Not necessarily. Sometimes for design reasons a feature / implementation is not desirable, or is out of scope. WONTFIX is a terrible keyword in Bugzilla that gives a "moral" connotation to something that has not.
To make an example: out of process plasmoids in Plasma - often requested, impossible to properly make without opening a whole can of worms at a technical level. Such a request would be WONTFIX as well. Would that be a problem? I think not.

But he can just stop coding if he doesn't respect others.

I would suggest you to strongly reconsider such an opinion. It is not only insulting to the developer himself, but to whoever does FOSS work.

The problem is that is mathematicaly sure if it continues in this direction, will have the end of nepomuk.

Where's your demonstration?

I'm not saying that things are perfect. However, if this trend of IMO fruitless negativity will go on the only effect will be that we won't get fixes or adjustments as the developer will move on elsewhere. Not quite the result we want, don't we?

einar wrote:No one is denying your right to criticize. But please remember that it works both ways, meaning you criticism can be criticized. [/quoted]
ofcourse i accepted. We don't receive always nice opinions, sometimes we receive congratulations and some times we are criticized.
But, i don't delete a post because i am criticized or someone has a negative opinion for my program.

The degree of a perceived impact tells nothing about its truthfulness. What makes me wonder is that why no one even complained during the beta cycle: this feature was present right from the start (check the sticky post in the Semantic Desktop session). I'm guessing that no one bothered to test, or report bugs.

Maybe during the beta cycle there are not many users that had tried it. They complain now as they have installed it and after discovering the changes.
Bugs are reported but as obvious things are rejected as wontfix, it is not only impossible to accept it, you are completely discouraged to continiuing reporting bugs, you just don't use it and is in this step where the users starting complaining.

Not necessarily. Sometimes for design reasons a feature / implementation is not desirable, or is out of scope. WONTFIX is a terrible keyword in Bugzilla that gives a "moral" connotation to something that has not.
To make an example: out of process plasmoids in Plasma - often requested, impossible to properly make without opening a whole can of worms at a technical level. Such a request would be WONTFIX as well. Would that be a problem? I think not.

I agree that in some cases the wontfix is a solution.

But he can just stop coding if he doesn't respect others.

I would suggest you to strongly reconsider such an opinion. It is not only insulting to the developer himself, but to whoever does FOSS work.

Although i can come back in my decisions and rethink them if someone shows me that i am wrong, here i don't reconsider as it is not a instant thought that i had just now, but a result of what finaly counts and what not, after all these years in foss: The humain rights are primary and the technology evolutions secondary.
I am administrator in the Greek Mageia community forum, i make attention to be objective, i 've never delete a post because someone said that Mageia doesn't work well ot other distro are better, even more, i don't use colors for admins/mods to make all posts having the same importance/weight.
Can you transfert to the community the comment below (from the bug#331932)
"I wanted to push people to make Desktop Search enabled by default."
"Fix the problems of your system first"
without insult them ? or finding forced excuses ?

The problem is that is mathematicaly sure if it continues in this direction, will have the end of nepomuk.

Where's your demonstration?

self.nepomuk

I'm not saying that things are perfect. However, if this trend of IMO fruitless negativity will go on the only effect will be that we won't get fixes or adjustments as the developer will move on elsewhere. Not quite the result we want, don't we?

I don't want to be hostage of a developer either manipulated from him. Is better to move elsewhere, where there are awards for these practics.
You know better than me that the success of a developer is when his program is used by users.
It is worst to loose the users so. But noway to forcing them to use your program.

Normally, this discussion shouldn't be happened; just have already this checkbox, let it be checked by default, put it in a 'Advanced' tab it is not so a big deal.