On 2016-10-22 10:58 AM, David Collier-Brown via talk wrote:
>
> Setting the default to off is exactly what a UX designer might do.
Given that Linux is a developer/sysadmin do-ocracy*, I'd be surprised if
there are any UX folks involved. Filesystem indexing chews disk space
and CPU, so I can easily some maintainer going eek and turning
everything useful off.
User-focused commercial OSes enable desktop search by default, so I
guess this just isn't the year of Linux On The Desktop yet … (a tired
joke since at least 2001). Jef Raskin produced systems in the 1980s
(SwyftWare, 1983; Canon CAT, 1987) with "Leap Keys" to do the equivalent
of desktop search. So this is hardly a cutting-edge need.
My last experience with installing search daemons on Ubuntu was not
good. One would silently fail if it found UTF-8 text. Another was
clearly maintained by someone with either a much smaller or much faster
system than me, as it ran cron jobs at very high priority that never
finished before the next update was triggered. Basically meant my
machine ran like molasses after an hour and needed the indexer processes
killed.
cheers,
Stewart
*: case in point - “Debian New Maintainers' Guide”
<https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/maint-guide/ > is all about being a
good Debian citizen and developer, and nothing to do with user experience.