DISCLAIMER: I don’t think this is the right way to fix broken stuff: every time something doesn’t work as expected users should file a bug report and ask developers to fix it.
Since its introduction Baloo has been accused to sucking system resources.
I don’t want to write about it’s problems - if there’s any - because the Web is already full of posts about this. Instead, since I’ve been ask several times about how to disable it, I’ll propose “the Arch way” to disable it.
While the libraries are an hard dependency because they are used by KMail, Dolphin and Gwenview, the executables are not. In particular baloo_file and baloo_file_extractor could be removed from your system.
I read OpenSuSE already provides two baloo packages to allow this and in fact I’ve been ask to split our baloo package too. But I’ll not do that.
Also, in that bug report Pierre Schmitz provides a valid point why you shouldn’t do that:
How would this work on a multi user system where some users want a file index and some don’t?
However, if you still don’t want to help in fixing issues Baloo causes on your system and if you still don’t care about a multi-user system, on Arch Linux you can disable baloo by putting this line in your /etc/pacman.conf:
NoExtract = usr/bin/baloo_file usr/bin/baloo_file_extractor
Note: you should re-install the baloo package after that or manually remove those files.
Tags: arch linux, linux, kde