Dolphin

[sledgehammer]

How, How, How?  I ask myself, how could I have missed using Dolphin for so long? 

I say this because Dolphin uses some program, nepotuk or some such, along with strigi, and indexes the hard drive on the fly.  I can search across files with Dolphin and find stuff on my hard drive quickly, while, best I can tell, my old friends Thunar and xfe require a file by file search. 

Unless someone knows another way to continuously index the hard drive, its Dolphin for me from now on. 

[retired1af]

SOHO uses Nepomuk, although if you have a low end system, it can easily bring it to its knees during its first run. On my poor ol' Toshiba notebook, it got so bad I finally turned the bloody thing off permanently. Haven't tried it on my ASUS (turned it off immediately after installing SOHO). I'll make a note and turn it on and see how things go (in 7.1 B0.43 right now).

[nightflier]

I was on the fence about KDE4 for years, but made the switch somewhere around version 4.9.5. I remember the indexer in 4.9.3 being a hog, but by now (currently on 4.11), it is very well behaved. If running, it immediately stops when I touch the mouse or keyboard. No slowdown noticed.

KDE4 has improved a lot just in the last year, and on a decent machine it returns a very nice user experience. By current standards, the hardware requirements are not unreasonable at all, I'd say comparable to W7.

[retired1af]

Turned the search service back on and I'm fairly impressed. Not taking a hit at all while doing my normal routines. Granted, this notebook is a bit more robust than the old Toshiba was, but all in all, it's performing quite well with no performance hit on the system.