Did not know either.

"Tracker is installed by default with Ubuntu 19.04. Tracker is a filesystem indexer, metadata storage system and search tool"

So no real privacy issue here or anything. But load on the system may be annoying. Boloo should be the KDE equivalent and I don't like it.

PS: Yes, this stuff can be annoying: " It wasn't installed by default until now due to performance concerns, but those issues seem to have been resolved."

> PS: Yes, this stuff can be annoying: " It wasn't installed by default until now due to performance concerns, but those issues seem to have been resolved."

Even more annoying if by "solved" they mean "everybody has SSDs now so we don't care". Windows 10 does that and it can become extremely painful to use on old spinning disks. I've seen machines where average seek times go over 1 second because Windows won't leave the damn disk alone after a few updates.

Unfortunate name

Isn't the KDE equivalent named Baloo?

Yes.

https://community.kde.org/Baloo

Yes, and it is annoying.

For finding stuff I use recoll. Not sure if baloo has also other uses.

Its not that annoying because you can go into the Search settings page of system settings (or just search for "search" in any of the various launchers) and turn it off with a checkbox.

Filesystem indexer for faster full-text search in Nautilus. But if I'm not using Nautilus to search for files or in files, it's just extra memory bloat and extra IO

Tracker also enables GNOME Shell's search feature, which provides search results for applications and files, and returns values from supported applications (e.g. GNOME Calculator) and extensions.

https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/Tracker/

Tracker is GNOME's analogue to Spotlight (from macOS/iOS) and Windows Search.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204014

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/search/wind...

Equivalent of MacOS's spotlight

It's a good thing with a bad name