
KDE and the Semantic Desktop - martgnz
http://vhanda.in/blog/2015/03/the-semantic-desktop-is-dead/
======
Morgawr
I've been a KDE user for a couple of years now. I've moved between DEs a lot
in the past, XFCE, LXDE, Gnome2/3, Cinnamon, Unity... I think I've tried them
all, even more obscure WM like AwesomeWM, XMonad and similars. I have to say
KDE beats them all on plenty of things. It is absolutely amazing and I
couldn't be happier using it.

However, on the other side of the coin, I've always hated semantic search and
indexing. Maybe it's because I'm a power user, but even when I was using
windows I hated the indexing of files. I hate the idea of something going
through my entire hard drive multiple times at intervals to track and scan all
my data, index it and make it readily available for me. Why? Because it's the
perfect invitation to have people more easily snoop on your stuff, because it
consumes resources, spins up disk I/O unnecessarily, introduces unexplainable
slowdowns. All of this for a comfort that I really don't require. I know where
I put my files, thank you very much. If I can't find a file, good ol'
find/grep can do the job equally well.

I had this massive problem with Baloo on KDE slowing down my entire machine, I
had to run iotop to figure out what the issue was. I run multiple sshfs
mounted partitions in my home and Baloo in its indexing would constantly crawl
through them multiple times every day, which means it'd send a lot of network
requests, slow down I/O operations everywhere and grind my machine to a halt.

It took me a while to figure out how to disable the entire thing (I wasn't
even aware KDE did indexing before that, to be honest) but now my machine is
better than ever. The first thing I do when I install a fresh KDE setup is to
turn off all that stuff and I would advice every power user on KDE to do that
as well.

~~~
baghira
Leaving aside the fact that anybody intended on snooping on you doesn't really
need the semantic desktop to accomplish his goal, I would argue that while on
your setup disabling baloo is clearly the right thing to do, when dealing with
TB of (local) storage baloo is faster than find/grep (also, grep cannot read
inside odf files). In this sense it is similar to akonadi: there is a
threshold after which, if you have a fast connection, it makes dealing with
20GB of email better than using an email client which uses sqlite. In a sense
I always felt that while nepomuk and akonadi where plagued with implementation
issues, part of the hostility in the KDE community was due to selection bias:
people who like KDE in general grok the "hierachical filesystem" metaphor,
viz. how kcm is structured. However the random Windows/OSX user (to which a
desktop environment like KDE has also to cater, to a certain extent) more
often than not has a terrible time organizing files: he creates "dumping
ground" folders, and then nest them eight times, or simply puts everything on
the desktop and ends up relying on finder for everything. Thankfully baloo now
can be easily disabled (and works better than the old nepomuk), and users who
need a fast Qt-based IMAP client can use Trojità.

~~~
sixbrx
Turning on search for special cases like 20GB of local email sounds like the
perfect reason to _opt-in_ to some sort of specialized search system of the
user's choosing.

------
ehvatum
The many times I did whatever it took to make Nepomuk and/or strigi stop using
CPU time, I always felt a vague sense of guilt.

Am I a bad person for depending on the combination of having an SSD + endless
variations of the find command, strings, and grep? Such as find ./ -iname '
_.c ' -or -iname '_.h' -exec grep -Hn pattern \\{\\} \; ?

I just want my data in text; I don't care about semantic anything, and I'm
sorry :( I wish I had time to appreciate whatever the hell it is these
processes I must stop are trying to accomplish, but I'm relieved they are
going away or being cut down to doing just one thing in a well defined role.

~~~
lifeisstillgood
Don't feel guilty. I read the article twice and still have no real idea what
it was about - sea of names and acronyms that just don't tell a story.

The zen of python has a line ... If it is hard to explain, it's probably a bad
idea.

------
lmm
Good riddance. It was a bad idea at the time and still is, just like the
Semantic Web itself. Nepomuk was complex and fragile, as was Akonadi; I've
lost count of the number of times I was unable to read my email because this
supposedly "optional" piece failed (usually due to an akonadi problem). In the
end I resorted to
[https://www.trinitydesktop.org/](https://www.trinitydesktop.org/) \- KDE3
which was less flashy, but worked.

This post is a good sign - maybe KDE is belatedly paying attention to user-
facing functionality rather than academic technology exercises. Maybe I can
switch back to "mainline" KDE.

~~~
fafner
Akonadi really annoys me. Who thought it would be a good idea to run mysql on
each desktop to store email metadata? That's just ridiculous bloat. Mysql is
among the top 10 entries for me in powertop. Why would MySQL be needed to deal
with the metadata? All other mail applications seem to do fine with Maildir
and an index.

And in case anybody thought that using MySQL would allow them to scale (you
know because people receiving a million mails/s is such a common use case)
then the answer is no! Thanks to Nepomuk many operations were bound by the RDF
triple store they used. Maybe it has improved now thanks to Baloo. But once I
tried to delete a folder containing a mailing list with a few thousand mails
and I wondered why my laptop got so hot until I realised that Nepomuk was
struggling.

Maybe the situation has improved now though. But the whole KMail transition
was really painful for no tangible benefits to the user. This really feels
like a prime example of overengineering.

~~~
mreiland
> Maybe the situation has improved now though. But the whole KMail transition
> was really painful for no tangible benefits to the user. This really feels
> like a prime example of overengineering.

That's how I felt about most of KDE4.

------
Fiahil
Nepomuk was nothing else, to me, than a series of repeated Segfaults.

The semantic web bring ideas for structuring informations, enabling machines-
exploitable databases to exists. The Semantic Desktop was -maybe- ahead of its
time, but certainly too poorly implemented.

~~~
kdomanski
[http://nepomuk.semanticdesktop.org/Project+Summary.html](http://nepomuk.semanticdesktop.org/Project+Summary.html)

The semantic desktop was nothing more than a way to leech EU grants for
"innovation". They've been looking for use cases long after the money ran out.

------
PythonicAlpha
Almost everybody I know, that was using KDE, did it because of the pure
desktop and not because of the semantic Desktop. Every time, the discussion
came to the later, it was how to disable it.

I think, it was a bold idea, but not well implemented. Maybe it also was to
soon for such a bold move. With the advent of more cores and faster disks (eg.
SSD) there might come the time for an other desktop to implement such thing.
When you have eight or more cores, you don't have to worry when one is doing
an indexing job all the time.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
For me the semantic desktop was too resource hungry so it was turn it off or
move to a different DE - at one point I had to remove the actual binaries in
order to disable it the devs were so keen to push their ideal DE it seemed.

TBH if I'd been using the full KDE communication suite then perhaps it would
have made sense but the refusal to support the sending of html email for kmail
(did they change that yet) moved be back to Thunderbird a long time ago.

I applaud the innovation and feel that the community would have really been
behind it if it had been optional from the get-go. Having never used
Activities I still appreciate that KDE devs tried something different, the
great thing with Activities is that – whilst initially you couldn't turn them
off – they kept out the way and used little-to-no resources.

The desktop search, integrated to Dolphin, is great. Usually I use
locate/find/grep but I'd use an integrated search if it could be tamed in its
resource usage; but that's really the limit of the "semantic desktop" that I
find useful under my desktop use at present.

~~~
emilsedgh
KMail sends HTML emails just fine. With a nice WYSIWYG editor.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Cool, I'm glad they caved in the end. Next time I'm trying new MUAs I'll
include it in the list.

------
davidgerard
When I hear the words "desktop" and "innovation", I reach for my revolver.

My current fervent hope is that Xfce just does 4.x versions forever and never
goes to a CADT-cursed 5.x.

~~~
1ris
I think the Desktop needs innovation more than ever. But right now everything
IMO just gets worse. I'm using a reactionary and dead simple XFCE. But I don't
want this to be the future.

~~~
davidgerard
The important thing to remember - and that the CADT development model forgets
- is that _most new ideas are bad_.

I recall the hilarity when GNOME 3, after claiming "no no we're making it
tablet-friendly!" was busted clearly not actually having a tablet amongst any
of their developers ... because it was literally impossible to get out of the
screensaver using the on-screen keyboard.
[http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3017371&cid=4083522...](http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3017371&cid=40835229)
Their claims of developing for tablet users were _literally delusional_.

"You misunderstand. Our goal is to make computers easier to use, not to make
them more useful." [http://commandcenter.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/we-open-in-
well-...](http://commandcenter.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/we-open-in-well-lit-
corporate.html)

------
frik
I would say "Baloo", based on Xapian search engine and SQLite, is still a
"desktop search":
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desktop_search](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desktop_search)

The older KDE desktop search implementations Strigi (based on C++ based Lucene
port) and the EU sponsored ontology based Nepomuk research project failed.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEPOMUK_(framework)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEPOMUK_\(framework\)).
I remember KDE "D-Bus" cause many problems in the early days of Strigi and
Nepomuk.

Gnome and Ubuntu use/used the Nepomuk ontology as well:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MetaTracker](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MetaTracker)

The _desktop search engine war_ era (2003-2006) between Microsoft Windows
Longhorn WinFS (2003-2006), Microsoft Windows Vista desktop search (2006),
Apple MacOS X 10.4+ Spotlight (2005) and Google desktop search (2004-2011)
also brought desktop search to the Linux desktop.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Search#Windows_Desktop_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Search#Windows_Desktop_Search)
,
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotlight_(software)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotlight_\(software\))
,
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Desktop](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Desktop)

One of the reason why WinFS failed was its complex ontology (and it was coded
in C# in user mode, so it was very slow). Windows Vista shipped with
traditional desktop search with an advanced search dialog and a very good
basic onotolgy (sadly the advanced search dialog is missing since Windows 7).
WinXP already had the optional "indexing service" predecessor and the desktop
search was also available as "MSN" addon download.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Search#Windows_Desktop_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Search#Windows_Desktop_Search)

Edit: to the downvoter: D-Bus was inspired by OLE, DCOM, CORBA, KParts, Bonobo
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-Bus](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-Bus)).
Search on Google for "strigi dbus problem", "nepomuk dbus problem". D-Bus
caused problems in the early days of KDE4, strigi and later nepomuk era.

~~~
toyg
DBus is totally separate from Strigi and Nepomuk -- it's a IPC bus, and a
GNOME invention.

~~~
cgh
Dbus was created by freedesktop.org and was based on KDE's DCOP. I don't think
it's fair to call it a Gnome invention.

~~~
mreiland
Which was itself based off of things like COM and CORBA. How far back do we
want to go?

------
Zitrax
It's very rare that I have to search my whole machine. Mostly my search need
is to find a string in a specific directory using grep.

I am happy to get rid of the automatic indexing, it has caused me nothing but
pain.

------
pnathan
I have used KDE for a few years now. Fundamentally, I don't mind the idea of a
semantic desktop, but I don't want the indexer to be running unpredictably,
and I want to construct my own layers of meaning.

The way I have addressed this is: I have a large blob of files; I've ordered
them through typical directories. This is portable through Linux/Windows/OSX
(some of these files have migrated from DOS). The directory structure and
naming itself is my semantic categorization. It's a bit hinky in places, but
it is (1) portable and (2) supported by any operating system work using on the
desktop.

At some point I will probably write an indexing system designed to handle
tagging to deal with my files: however, at present, I get what I want when it
comes to files.

------
anonbanker
I feel about Activities the same way I feel about nepomuk and virtual
desktops: great idea, but useless for my workflow.

That said, KDE 5 (even with huge showstopping kwin_x11 bugs in latest Arch) is
light years beyond every other desktop, including Yosemite and Aero.

------
mark_l_watson
Too bad this semantic desktop concept did not work out.

I have two Linux laptops, and as I started reading the article, I was thinking
of installing KDE, only to be disappointed to read that the project is
basically dead.

I have written two Semantic Web books and have had some semantic markup on my
web sites for about ten years, but my view of the SW is changing. Google
Knowledge Graph, which I worked with in 2013, is basically a huge triple
store, but different than SW because it is one giant curated repository, and
not a distributed interlinked graph comprised of many sources.

~~~
frik
As you mentioned _Google Knowledge Graph_ , it's based on the open Freebase
ontology. Google bought the company behind Freebase and the ontology will be
no more in March 31, 2015: [http://www.freebase.com](http://www.freebase.com)
,
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freebase](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freebase)

A rather sad demise. There is an half-hearted(?) attempt to donate some data
to WikiData of Wikipedia. But given the track record of WikiData history and
how different the ontology is, it looks like Freebase will go offline forever
and used as internal datasource for Google Knowledge Graph.

It would be great if Google would donate the data and the tools to generate
Freebase to Archive.org or another open source community, so that they can
regenerate the ontology on a monthly interval from its Wikipedia, and various
other data sources. Given that Freebase is also what powers Siri, Cortana and
Watson, maybe another corporation can help.

~~~
mark_l_watson
I agree. I have used Freebase since Metaweb became a company. Really sorry to
see Freebase disappear. Archives are runnable on a publicly available AWS EC2
image, but there will be no more community contributions to Freebase.

~~~
pnathan
Is there a way to migrate Freebase into a community-funded project? Having
that kind of knowledge set disappear is very concerning.

------
legulere
The semantic approach seems to work quite well for gnome 3 with tracker.

