The KDE web-page has one word in huge letters on it's home page: FREEDOM.

And this is probably why a lot of people use KDE instead of Unity or even Windows: traditionally, KDE has allowed the user to configure nearly every aspect of the desktop and it was possible to just use what you need.

With baloo and the "semantic search" component things are different. There is no way to disable this, and there is no way to simply de-install it. It is buggy and causes problems for many people. It occupies the CPU even if the home directory is on the block list.
This is a terrible piece of software and it is appalling that developers think they know better than their users by not allowing to disable this completely.

You see, even if the problem can be fixed in some way, ultimately, even if I could still disable this software with some tricks on the command line, you are causing a lot of users simply getting set up. You got me set up enough to write this post and to switch from KDE to XFCE.

Not cool, KDE.

Just for the record, changes in regards to this have been made in KDE 4.13.1 - please try this update before commenting further.

Please make sure to adhere to the Code of Conduct, which is part of the . While I can understand your frustration, you are still expected to keep a respectful tone in the forums. Calling something "terrible" and making assumptions about the thought of developers is not constructive.

A final note: "freedom" does not mean that you should be able to configure every single aspect of the software, so that is not a very good argument. It would be better to explain your use-case and elaborate why indexing is not useful to you. The buginess can be fixed (it would be appreciated if you could report bugs you encounter to the bug tracker), and I'm pretty sure the CPU thing is also a bug.

Let me put it differently then: for me and for quite a number of other users, making it impossible to disable the search function is a terrible choice. And allowing a user to switch off something that is not needed or wanted is not "configure every single aspect of the software" but quite a basic and essential freedom which at least I expect (and if you look around on the internet about this, you will see there are quite a number of other users who feel rather alike).

Issues like this are , eventually, not actually about wheter some feature is useful or not, but about how users feel treated by the software the love and which they choose because of something that for them made it preferable over other software. As I said before, my feeling is that KDE has a lot of users which use KDE exactly because they did not like the way how Gnome and especially Unity force choices on their users. The KDE project is free to repeat that error or make those users feel welcome and home. I took the time to let you know that this is something which aleniates me and does not make me feel at home at all. Make of it what you like, treat it as a violation of your code of conduct, it is up to you. I made the choice not to use KDE any more until I see some progress here. Luckily, Linux as a whole is about freedom and choice.

bcooksley wrote:Just for the record, changes in regards to this have been made in KDE 4.13.1 - please try this update before commenting further.

Thank you for this feedback. The whole problem became apparent to me when I upgraded my computer to the latest version of Ubuntu (14.04) so from the Ubuntu distribution I probably have the newest version of KDE I can get.
Is there an easy way to, under Ubuntu, update KDE to an even more recent version? Will it allow me to disable the search?

you can ask your distro to provide the "Desktop Search Advanced" kcm to 4.13.0 (the module scheduled to be in 4.13.1) as openSUSE has (it's in their unstable extra repo so it's possible) which provides disabling and more control over Baloo

You can also disable the indexing by editing the rc file (instructions are somewhere on the forum or the web), one option it to add ~/ to the do not index locations in the existing "Desktop Search" kcm

google01103 wrote:You can also disable the indexing by editing the rc file (instructions are somewhere on the forum or the web),

Thank you, this should do the trick! I think I got confused about "no way to turn off search" and "no way to turn off search in the GUI". I suppose having a (hopefully well documented) configuration option in a config file is something I can live with although I still think that it may be too inconvenient for other users who simply do not want search to be active.

one option it to add ~/ to the do not index locations in the existing "Desktop Search" kcm

Maybe this is a bug but that definitely did not work in my case. My home directory is shown in the dialog in that list but the baloo file extractor program still used 100% of both CPUs on my computer. Even killing the process did not help, it got restarted automatically.

fyi - as 4.13.1 is scheduled to be released today (operative word is "scheduled") you should have the new kcm soon

explanation of the rc file which describes how to disable Baloo http://community.kde.org/Baloo/Configur ... 2F_Disable

google01103 wrote:fyi - as 4.13.1 is scheduled to be released today (operative word is "scheduled") you should have the new kcm soon

Tag would be today, release is next week, at least according to techbase.

k/r

F

K-Fuchs wrote:

google01103 wrote:fyi - as 4.13.1 is scheduled to be released today (operative word is "scheduled") you should have the new kcm soon

Tag would be today, release is next week, at least according to techbase.

k/r

F

sorry - my bad

google01103 wrote:explanation of the rc file which describes how to disable Baloo http://community.kde.org/Baloo/Configur ... 2F_Disable

Just to note that on this page the config file is given as ~/.kde4/share/apps/config/baloofilerc while on my computer there only exists a file ~/.kde/share/config/baloofilerc

jansmeral wrote:

google01103 wrote:explanation of the rc file which describes how to disable Baloo http://community.kde.org/Baloo/Configur ... 2F_Disable

Just to note that on this page the config file is given as ~/.kde4/share/apps/config/baloofilerc while on my computer there only exists a file ~/.kde/share/config/baloofilerc

This has to do with different distros naming the KDE user folder differently, either ~/.kde or ~/.kde4, the person who wrote that probably used what his distro does

Just use `kde4-config --localprefix` instead, it will point to the correct location.

k/r

F

jansmeral wrote:The KDE project is free to repeat that error or make those users feel welcome and home. I took the time to let you know that this is something which aleniates me and does not make me feel at home at all. Make of it what you like, treat it as a violation of your code of conduct, it is up to you. I made the choice not to use KDE any more until I see some progress here. Luckily, Linux as a whole is about freedom and choice.

Point is, even if there's something you disagree with, you're expected to be considerate and constructive. The Code of Conduct is there to remind us to work together as a community.

Just think about it from a developer's point of view - do you think a developer would be happy to read that his/her project is terrible and having others make assumptions about their motivations behind a decision, when they've spent a significant amount of their free time thinking about the best solution for those users and implemented it? In this case it would be better to explain why you need to disable indexing so that the developer can take your use case into consideration.

For what it's worth I don't disagree with you; I personally also think there should be an option to disable the indexing, and feel that a whitelist would make more sense than a blacklist. Hopefully the new KCM module will satisfy both of our needs!