Baloo and Frameworks 5.111

Tips and Tricks
1

As systems pick up the newly released Framework 5.111, Baloo is likely to reindex your chosen folders.

Details in 475919 – Dolphin search shows doubled results.

If you are running openSUSE or other system that sets up BTRFS with multiple subvolumes, this will be “one extra” indexing and the patch will fix the issue where rebooting the system often triggered a reindex. Fedora, that also uses BTRFS, adopted the patch before it reached 5.111 so has dealt with issue.

People running “vanilla” systems over Ext4 may however encounter it. As per the bug, when you search in Dolphin you might get two results:

This is the file you are looking for.txt
This is the file you are looking for.txt (1)

You can clear up the issue by purging the index; for systems with systemd with the commands:

pkill baloo_file
balooctl purge
systemctl --user start kde-baloo.service

There has been a recent change to baloo that limits the amount of RAM it can use (MemoryHigh is set to 512 M Byte in the kde-baloo.service file). Reindexing could be slower but it should not impact system performance as it did in the past.

Purging and reindexing as above is not necessary but probably sensible…

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2

There is a potentially a second issue that might appear.

There has been a long term (and very slippery) bug where you can search “Your Files” with Dolphin and find a match but if you go to particular folder and search from there, you don’t find the match.

You can also see this when using the command line:

 $ baloosearch -i "the file you are looking for"

will find the file (which you might have in your Documents) but

 $ baloosearch -i -d ~/Documents "the file you are looking for"

does not find it.

This is being tracked in: bug 474973 – baloosearch (as well as Dolphin and other apps using baloo) do not find anything when serching files inside the Downloads directory.

Previously it mostly affected BTRFS users (some assumptions are being made here) but with the Frameworks 5.111 reindexing it can also affect “vanilla” Ext4 users.

The solution is to purge and reindex as above.

(Edit: typo in bug number)