Global search at last

Posted Mar 22, 2024 14:56 UTC (Fri) by zdzichu (subscriber, #17118)
In reply to: Global search at last by Herve5
Parent article: GNOME 46 released

I remember doing a talk about Beagle (related to GNOME) some 20 years ago. It was pervasive desktop which was supposed to just find everything related to the current context. Not sure what's the status now, all my search needs are satisfied by `locate` and ripgrep.

Global search at last

Posted Mar 23, 2024 9:55 UTC (Sat) by swilmet (subscriber, #98424) [Link] (4 responses)

There is still the website: https://beagle-project.org/

Was it integrated/installed by default with some distributions?

Sometimes GNOME developers have great ideas, but then for some reasons the project doesn't get the spotlight and several years later it is abandoned.

Global search at last

Posted Mar 23, 2024 16:47 UTC (Sat) by denials (subscriber, #3413) [Link]

GMOME's current solution for desktop search is Tracker (https://tracker.gnome.org/overview/) and it has been for quite a few years.

I think Beagle was part of the Ximian Desktop effort led by Nat Friedman and Miguel de Icaza. Given that Ximian was purchased by Novell in 2003 and Beagle stopped being an active project in 2006, maybe it ceased to be a priority for the corporation, and/or maybe GNOME opted to go on a different technical direction.

I couldn't quickly find a story about the Beagle -> Tracker transition but I'm sure it's out there, somewhere :)

Global search at last

Posted Mar 23, 2024 19:37 UTC (Sat) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link] (2 responses)

I believe beagle and some other search tools in the past have been 'defaults' in theory, but turned off in most distributions due to the users complaints about memory usage, cpu usage or slow speeds from disk reads.

Apple had a better story for this because the 'create some metadata' happened regularly when files are saved and they seem to have scaled out the searching to be 'good' enough for the CPU/memory the system had. [Controlling exact amounts of this means you can tune the database to what you know will work versus guessing how N! different hardware might work which GNOME and KDE have to do]

Global search at last

Posted Mar 24, 2024 3:52 UTC (Sun) by denials (subscriber, #3413) [Link]

Yeah, the first iterations of Tracker were not very nice to CPU usage, at least when it ran into my 500GB drive full of content in my home directory from which it had to build a search index from scratch. I think the use cases assumed a fresh install with user files being added incrementally, but the indexer processes happily consumed 99% of my CPU cores in their effort to race to the finish. I manually nice'd the indexing processes so that I could do my own work, then eventually just killed the Tracker daemon and told it to never start again.

But that was years ago. I run Fedora and have done fresh installs recently, and haven't noticed it bogging down any of my systems for a long time. However, others still run into similar issues, e.g. from August 2023: https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/tracker-miner-fs3-...

Global search at last

Posted Mar 25, 2024 12:35 UTC (Mon) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

> I believe beagle and some other search tools in the past have been 'defaults' in theory, but turned off in most distributions due to the users complaints about memory usage, cpu usage or slow speeds from disk reads.

If it's anything like KDE/Baloo, I bet a lot of people just killed it and won't touch it now with a bargepole.

I guess it's many years now (my computer at the time was an AMD Athlon 1.4GHz), but I was forced to stop using KDE for a while, because the "login to full desktop" time was measured in days! I don't know how many because I never let it run to completion - I wanted to actually get some work done! For a desktop that's shut down every night, that's a no-no.

Cheers,
Wol