What is Baloo and why is it Eating My Machine?!

Baloo was number one in top and I didn't even know what it was. Turned out it was the search indexer for the KDE Plasma dekstop. The funny thing was, I didn't even run KDE at the time, I was running i3! But since Baloo is started from systemd, it was eating away my CPU sycles anyway.

This is how I got rid of this resource hog:

Stopping the baloo indexer

$ balooctl suspend

Disable the baloo indexer

$ balooctl disable
Disabling and stopping the File Indexer

You can verify that it's been disabled:

$ cat .config/baloofilerc
[Basic Settings]
Indexing-Enabled=false

Purge the giga bytes consumed byt he indexer

Since I never use KDE for anything useful on this machine, it's my work machine, so I use i3, I decided to purge the whole file to save the disk space (it was occupying more than 4 GBs):

$ balooctl purge

~ /home 🏠 ~ talks 💬 ~ bash ~ craftsmanship ~ db ~ dongxi ~ emacs ~ escenic ~ iam ~ java ~ js ~ language ~ latex ~ ldap ~ life ~ linux ~ llm ~ mac-os-x ~ mt-foo ~ network ~ norsk ~ python ~ quotes ~ running ~ security ~ travel ~ unix ~ various ~ vcs ~ webdesign ~ windows ~ discoveries ~ cv 🧙 ~

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