Search-based interfaces
In the up-and coming version of Ubuntu, Gutsy Gibbon, there are new and better document search facilities. This is not without problems: Upon upgrading one of my computers to Gutsy, I noticed that random applications would slow down, and even stall totally on my system.
My question is: Are such features really needed? In my 26+ years of owning and using a computer, I have never searched my filesystem for random content in any of my files, save grepping through known sets of files.
Which brings me to the real question: is this a feature that users actually want or need? Input from Mac and Windows users especially welcome: Do you use these features, or would you prefer for your system to instead speed up?
Comments
Comment from Phrodo_00 on 2007-08-11 02:23
The slowing down and crashing is most likely to be because of using unstable unreleased and untested software (gnome 2.19). Gnome 2.18 and tracker 0.6 work like a charm together in my archlinux desktop.
And although it’s definitely not a critical feature once you start to use it you grow atached to it. Kind of like Deskbar and calendar events in the clock’s calendar.
Comment from Andrew Ho on 2007-08-23 12:33
I’m a Mac user, and I’ve never used Spotlight. I can appreciate that for someone with a disorganised folder structure, it might be useful (people who, say, chuck all of their files from the past n years into one folder), but I have a rigid structure that I’ve always used, so it’s not necessary. I also occasionally bring out the old
find . -name '*.txt' -exec grep 'pattern' {} \;when needed.This discussion has been closed. No further comments may be added.