fragility

With yesterday’s launch of Google Desktop for GNU/Linux, I decided to take a look at the desktop search options again. I tried Beagle on the past, but I always found it too slow and ram consuming, and it never seemed to index stuff right. So here’s my new comparison of three desktop search options for GNU/Linux. If you know about any other options, I’d really like to know about it.

Beagle

I hate it. It’s still slow as hell, eats up a lot of ram, takes a long time to index stuff the first time (but it’s not intrusive because it only indexes while the processor is idle) and even when used together with deskbar it’s somehow stupid, because you have to type in the result, select the “search with beagle” option and wait for the beagle application to open and search it for you. I have to admit that I didn’t even let it index everything before I uninstalled it. Some guys I know would say “oh…it’s Mono !”. I’m not really an anti-Mono fanboy (I love Tomboy) but I don’t think Mono is the kind of platform which should be used to develop this kind of app (at least, not the daemon). But then again, what do I know ?

Tracker

Extremely fast indexing stuff on the first time, but in order to be that fast it uses your processor a lot, which can become intrusive, so you’d better have it index your stuff over night on the first time. Has a low ram consumption, it’s fast, and has a great integration with deskbar (gives you live results within deskbar, just like spotlight on the mac).
By the way, thanks a lot to Filipe Carvalho for writing about it. I had heard about Tracker before, but completely forgot its name, and I didn’t try it at the time because the project was still very young.

Google Desktop

Looks good and it’s easy to setup. Takes a long time on the first index (but like Beagle it’s not intrusive). The keyboard shortcut (hitting Ctrl twice) is not configurable and can become quite annoying, specially if you’re a keyboard shortcut freak like me. I use Ctrl+Alt+Directional Keys for desktop change, and sometimes Google Desktop just comes up unexpectedly. Also, the fact that it only shows a few results and in order to see more you need it to open a browser page, is not very practical.

Considering these three options, my favorite is undoubtedly Tracker. It’s fast, light and has a perfect integration with my Gnome desktop.

Update:
Looks like there’s a way to integrate live Beagle searches into deskbar as well (thanks to those who pointed that out on the comments). That’s not the biggest hassle I have with Beagle anyway, so I’ll still keep Tracker. Other thing I noticed and forgot to mention: Tracker eats less disk space than Google Desktop.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 29th, 2007 at 12:59 pm and is filed under gnu/linux, desktop. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.