Let’s tell the truth when Baloo acts up over half have the issue. The fact of the matter most of them simply wait for a fix and don’t take the time to report the issue. This is the case with most Os or software issues.
Don’t put words in my mouth please, I just pointed out that while some users have problems with baloo, the majority don’t, so we shouldn’t just drop baloo because it’s not perfect for everybody.
If you don’t like baloo and another software works better for you, then by all means use said software, but don’t try to keep everybody else from using baloo.
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Sorry, that’s not my experience in the software world: people are quick to complain when something doesn’t work for them (and sadly, most of the time they believe/assume it’s the same for everybody else).
Anyway. it’s not my intention to start a war (I’m here to find and provide help to my fellow Linux users after all), so this is my last comment on the subject.
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While Stetsbequem was making something political that wasn’t you are still wrong about it only being 1 in 10 that has the issue when Baloo has issues eating too many resources. Again most don’t bother to report the issue. You cannot just make stuff up and expect to get away with it.
No-one has the definitive numbers to say that they are right or wrong.
My personal experience of Baloo (which may be exclusive to me but is not in any way less valid than anyone else’s experience) is that it has improved over the last few years much as other elements of KDE such as Discover have.
I can remember five years ago avoiding using both Baloo and Discover as both had bugs that became apparent very soon after using them, and these bugs had also been reported at https://bugs.kde.org/ so I chipped in occasionally with “me too” and any other information. Neither was essential to my workflow (I could live without an indexer and am happier managing software/packages on the command line).
Now, the effort put into fixing and improving Discover has paid off and it works great for me and I see much fewer complaints about it. (I still choose not to use it for the reason given above and don’t currently have it installed).
For Baloo, the CPU capping mentioned by @Herzenschein above is very apparent to me and my 10 year old laptop, and I now feel confident in it enough to use it. I’ve excluded a fair few folders, but also included most of a second drive with music and video files, and activated the file content search. The first run at indexing takes a long time, so I wait to do that until I’m not doing much else on the laptop (it’s so much nicer being able to do this rather than the approach taken by the much less manageable tracker3).
My search workflow has changed now - I almost always just search from the Kickoff launcher and find what I want rather than opening Dolphin first.
I’m not in any doubt that other people are experiencing bugs/problems with Baloo, nor that what it indexes and when to do that first index need some management by the user. But I am clear that it has improved over the last 5 years.
Ultimately as @ngraham says:
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@Locutus a lot of your posts are worded in a very aggressive manner. This isn’t an appropriate method of communicating here, so please tone it down and try to see things from other people’s points of view rather than accusing and criticizing so much.
This is an official warning.
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To get back to the topic, Baloo has a major known issue in that it misbehaves with BTRFS filesystems, which will affect a lot of people using openSUSE and Fedora-based distros quite badly, since those distros default to using that filesystem. This is often a cause of people having such divergent experiences regarding Baloo.
Happily, there’s an open merge request to fix it: Draft: Use the FSID as the device identifier where possible (!131) · Merge requests · Frameworks / Baloo · GitLab
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Ok, because the experimental file system for server farms in the size of Faceb**k namely BTRFS has moved to the center*, I would like to add briefly that here with me XFS protects my data.
(* I’m sure you follow the links to r/kde as much as I do, right?)
Well, I wouldn’t blame anyone for that. It can be quite the pain when you rely on some searching and realize it doesn’t work.
Nah, I disagree. It can be a very handy and powerful tool to organize the many files we have nowadays.
Definitely, its intended function(s) makes it very worthwile!
I frankly disagree with this. I am afraid people just stop bothering and find work arounds (kfind etc.). I have myself searched many, many times to resolve my problems… but if I did find some discussion proper, then usually it ended unresolved.
Fun Fact: Reddit is not a good place to read up on baloo (or anything technical), due the unhelpful majority of, pardon me!, bickering morons.
Yes, I think so, too. Sometimes, Baloo permitting, I had some wonderful work flows, cleaning up my multi-TB mess of data.
I resent this remark… until you make nice short comparison of both and point out their respective (dis)advantages. No, rly, I would appreciate such overview very much 
Back to topic: No, I don’t think baloo is currently of much use to me but I would love to have it working. How do we get it up and running for all?
Should we make a baloo thread trying to help each other? Anyone in?
@richarson, not really, if they’ve enabled feedback in plasma-systemsettings, since that’s rather what opt-in telemetry is for.
There is nothing wrong with my post. Let’s please stick to the subject at hand and telling the truth. Thanks
A lot of us after dealing with Microsoft’s intrusiveness Are EXTREMELY leary of turning on anything that sends out any data in the background. While I greatly appreciate that KDE doesn’t thrust it upon us giving us the choice of having it off or set to various levels unlike Microsoft where you are force with a lot of there telemetry settings to download a third party app to be able to turn them off.
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@Locutus, I don’t understand – the user either disables telemetry to prevent sending diagnostic data to KDE, or enables it to send it. It’s off by default.
What’s the problem?
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Please reread my post. I said KDE gives you the choice unlike Microsoft “I greatly appreciate that KDE doesn’t thrust it upon us giving us the choice of having it off or set to various levels”.
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