I am longtime KDE user, though I never feel the need to register to the forums. Until today.

I upgraded SuSe from 13.1 to 42.1 and suddenly my work comfort was immedietely and visibly degraded. My laptop keeps on freezing, environment become
unresponsive. Finally I discovered that the thing which was responsible for my frustration was something called "baloo", which supposedly is related to a feature I never used in my life and which I do not ever intended to use: a desktop search. It took me at least an hour until I finally decided to soft link all baloo_* binaries to the /usr/bin/true.

I am so angry about that misfeature, so I just had to register here to vent this anger. Why there is something which heavily disorganizes my job just in order to offer me something I do not ever want to use? Last time it was the same with akonadi. Finally I removed the **** along with kmail. In the classroom, students were given 600 MB disk quota and yet very often they could no anything usable, and it took some time before we find out that it was akonadi which took large chunk of the quota and caused many hours of frustration and lost time. And now it's the same with baloo.

WHy, why KDE developers insist on turning DEFAULT an application for which neither me nor any of my friends could find any use, an application which is a terrible hog and which causes even the fastest machines to freeze? I mean, if I want to do a search, there is locate and find, and if it take a long time, I am prepared to wait few seconds. But if I am doing something important and suddenly my laptop freezes for minutes, that's just so maddeningly user-hately behaviour.

I am of impression that KDE became over the years more and more beautiful and less and less useable.

No, you are wrong. It's not my fault. I am quite sure because I spent a lot of time googling for reasons why my laptop was so unresponsive. It had not crashed - it was frozen because some unneeded piece of software ate all the resources. Please also not that in this particular example, KDE developers have _deprived_ me of choice.

Baloo ate whole CPU time for several days. The symptoms were that after login computer freezed for several minutes, then unfreezed, crawled a bit, freezed again and so on. When I finally got access to console, I have noticed baloo was taking almost whole available CPU and memory. I killed it and for some time everything was fine, then it freezed again. I couldn't do anything on my laptop, so I googled for solutions on another PC. Finally I just symlinked baloo to /usr/bin/true and all the problems vanished.

Note that if I would not be quite an experienced linux user, I would be stuck. I would uninstall either KDE, or Linux.

I was never so frustrated by a software piece for at least several years. My hands were literally shaking with anger. I was shouting profanities at my laptop. I am calm introvert, so this was quite an accomplishment on part of whoever made the decision about forcing baloo on me.

It was caused in part because I've read thread discussions were it was made clear, that the decision was made to force baloo on users despite problems with it being known to KDE developers, and the decision to make it not obvious to disable was also intentional. I've felt it was very microsoft-like decision. Indeed, when I think about it now, the last time i was so angry at the software was more than 15 years ago, when I was still a windows user.

My home directory is several gigas worth, it contains a lot of music, graphics, pdfs and so on. My laptop is 2 core Celeron 1.7 Ghz Lenovo machine. IF this a machien not powerful enough to handle baloo, or if my habits are not suitable for baloo, then why it is turned on by default? In order to browse web, get email, edit some pictures, listen to music and so on I would need to buy a super-duper-hardware?

At least the environment should check whether the system is powerful enough, or if the home directory is too large. The best would be asking the user whether he wants the feature, warn about possible problems with not powerful enough machines, or make it easy to turn off.

I would say that the software and developers attitudes about it violated basic developer's and unix philosophy principles. Instead or in addition of Code of Conduct, KDE should adapt some Code of Merit to at least make developers aware that this kind of software behaviour is absolutely unacceptable.

In addition, I still have no idea what baloo provides in addition to usual unix tools. I would say it tries to provide functionality at user level for things which should be ideally done on filesystem level.

What you describe sounds indeed more like a bug or a configuration issue than simply a problem with the software. It is indeed not unusual to have tons of files that would need to be indexed.
And normally baloo takes a good amount (not all) of the system on the initial scan, but that's about it, and also not that long. Several days seems completely off. I think i can even remember i had a similar issue during an update of opensuse some time back.

So, what would make sense is to find out why exactly your system breaks in that situation. This thread is however not the place for it.

And personally speaking, i can feel your pain, as said, it also hit me once. If it runs as intended, baloo adds some nice search capabilities. If it slows the system down unnecessarily, that sucks.

I had to disable a baloo too, some time ago. It would periodically hog cpu and cause annoying UI freezes, noticeable and annoying. There is no shortage of threads out there describing such problems with baloo and people seeking how to shut it off. (A notable example: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=333655) I also found it ate a pretty significant chunk of my disk space.

szopen wrote:... Baloo ate whole CPU time for several days...

ericjs wrote:It would periodically hog cpu and cause annoying UI freezes, noticeable and annoying.

I've disabled baloo not so long time ago. Today tried to give another chance to and enabled it. ~13% CPU by baloo_file_extractor as before.
I decided to rm -rf ~/.local/share/baloo and relogin. Few minutes of ~1% CPU by baloo_file_extractor and everything became allright! Yet without incident.
Try it!
P. S.: also excluded webdavs and windows (ntfs) drives to be on the safe side.