this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2026
52 points (100.0% liked)

Linux

67448 readers
186 users here now

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

Rules

Related Communities

Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0

founded 7 years ago
MODERATORS
 

**NOTE: i have only used linux for about a year or so and im not a power user, im basically a tired windows user but i know more stuff than most beginners i feel like? like not a lot more but a little bit ** so when i don't have anything open my memory usage is like 4-5GB out of 16, which makes it pretty bad when i want to play games (even minecraft can make it so my pc use 99% memory so i have to hard reset, although i might have fixed that) and/or when i want some demanding theming things (like a live wallpaper). "Background services" is using like 4GB and "baloo_file_extractor" is using like 1GB out of the 4. I have done a tiny tiny bit of research and ive found out that baloo is a file indexing thingo, but idrk what file indexing is used for so i don't know if i should disable it

distro: endeavourOS de: kde plasma wayland ram: 16gb of something (i have a prebuilt so idk what ddr it is or whatever)

if you need more info then please say so (i can't show images for some reason)

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] ardorhb@discuss.tchncs.de 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

File indexing allows (faster) searching of files and sometimes even allows finding files by their content not only the file name.

That said those indexers (I'm not using KDE so not sure about details of your specific case) can use an big amount of RAM especially if there are new files to index. As far as I unterstand they should pause if the RAM is needed otherwise but might depend on the implementation.

[–] thingsiplay@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 week ago

File indexing allows (faster) searching of files and sometimes even allows finding files by their content not only the file name.

At least for text files, grep can do that too. Off course it is not as fast as indexed files, but how often do you need that? There is ripgrep, a faster alternative. I personally don't miss indexed files as I thought I would. With fast drives and CPU and the knowledge how to do a proper search does most of the stuff I need. Just my opinion. The price for an indexer is too high to me (and besides they were responsible for the death of my SSD... I believe).