KDE's Nepomuk Doesn't Seem To Have A Future

[Ericg]

The KDE devs should be aware of this (for example: what if I share my computer with other people, and I don't want to create another account for them? KDE applications store a LOT of personal data in the system...). I gotta admit, though, I'm not very knowledgeable about how these apps work.

Depends on who this mystery other person is. Frankly if we shared an account I could just as easily go into Firefox and go through your browser history, or copy all the cookies from the temp folder and see where you've been, probably get your login info that way too. If we shared an account and you used a desktop email client i might be able to read your email.

The moment you let someone use your account you are GIVING them access to all of your associated user-specific info if they so choose. All the KDE stuff is stored under ~/.kde(4) so if you don't want someone who shares the computer getting access to that, then give them another account so that YOUR stuff is under ~/.kde(4) and THEIR stuff is under THEIR ~/.kde(4). Then the only way one of you can get into eachothers personal info is if one of you has root and chooses to snoop.

[mendieta]

nepomuk and akinondi are the things that made me switch from KDE to xfce4 to never return back.

At some point, when they integrated nepomuk into kmail, mail search stopped working! That was the culprit.

Same here, except that I didn't find anything better (I do like Dolphin, Plasma and the System Settings GUI). So, I removed KDEPIM from all my machines, disabled 'dsktop search' or whatever they call Nepomuk, but it's quite a bit of work. The end result is a basic Plasma Desktop, where I run Google Chrome, some apps from mix toolkits, including synaptic for packet management, and Thunderbird for email (yes, I went through the trouble of migrating all my email to Thunderbird, when KMail2 absolutely ruined it for me.

Too bad, because KDE libs are nice, and Qt is awesome.

[asdfblah]

Depends on who this mystery other person is. Frankly if we shared an account I could just as easily go into Firefox and go through your browser history, or copy all the cookies from the temp folder and see where you've been, probably get your login info that way too. If we shared an account and you used a desktop email client i might be able to read your email.

Well, in web browsers is very easy and convenient to avoid just that: Use a "incognito" session or delete everything by pressing ctrl+shift+del.

The moment you let someone use your account you are GIVING them access to all of your associated user-specific info if they so choose. All the KDE stuff is stored under ~/.kde(4) so if you don't want someone who shares the computer getting access to that, then give them another account so that YOUR stuff is under ~/.kde(4) and THEIR stuff is under THEIR ~/.kde(4). Then the only way one of you can get into eachothers personal info is if one of you has root and chooses to snoop.

In kde, as you say, you'd have to delete that folder to prevent anyone looking at your personal data...

For my example, I had cyber cafes in mind (which these days still exist in poor countries) and poor people's shared computers. What if devs changed things so you could use a "private session" in which you could (momentarily) disable the collection of data, by one app, or by the whole desktop environment? What if they integrated encryption, so you could access your data only by using passphrases (which would be annoying, but it could be made optional too)?

AFAI understand, if you want security in your applications, you have to code things with security in mind. There are lots of mechanisms in compilers and the kernels themselves to prevent the exploitation of bugs in the code, but if the applications are not written with security in mind, these mechanisms are useless.

[mark45]

Nobody seems to wonder why the EU spent a whooping 17 million euros for a relatively minor software project, did they pay each programmer as much as if each of them was Linus Torvalds?

[Cyber Killer]

I too disable Nepomuk, I also disable tracker and any other constantly running in the background indexing process. I got a load of files, but on the other hand I do ~1 search per month, cause I have it really neatly arranged in the tree. I don't need multi gigabyte indexes, I can easily wait the few minutes it takes to live search the data that I want.

[mo0n_sniper]

Good, I hated nepomuk.. That is always one of the first things I disable after installing linux and KDE.. It always runs in the background indexing crap and stuff....just for features that I will never use..

Does any one else actually use any features from nepomuk?..

Good riddance. I always hated that program also.

[andyprough]

Agent Ransack works under Wine

Good, I hated nepomuk.. That is always one of the first things I disable after installing linux and KDE.. It always runs in the background indexing crap and stuff....just for features that I will never use..

Does any one else actually use any features from nepomuk?..

I always used it. Turned it on at night when I was sleeping to index my system, disabled it during the day - just like any other indexing system (Copernic on Windows is quite similar in that regard).

Worked good enough for what it was. Made it easy to find stuff. With it working through Dolphin, it had a better interface than Google Desktop, although not as good as Recoll.

But these days, I need something better than just plain indexing. Agent Ransack (free download) works great on Windows, and works under Wine on Mint and Ubuntu:
http://www.mythicsoft.com/agentransack/

Gives you deep searches, Boolean and Regular Expression searches, date and proximity searches - stuff you really need. Along with the industry's best preview pane. And it's incredibly fast, although it will hog your CPU if you are searching 10's of thousands of files at a time.

[gigaplex]

Nobody seems to wonder why the EU spent a whooping 17 million euros for a relatively minor software project, did they pay each programmer as much as if each of them was Linus Torvalds?

They probably also had to pay testers, designers, managers etc, potentially rent, power and other infrastructure. Most software projects involve more than just programmers. Then again, I still don't see how they'd hit 17 million taking all of that into account.

[Marc Driftmeyer]

You spent 17 million Euros on a Semantics Web set of frameworks, for KDE? Who had the authority to waste that sort of funding? You've got an agning Window Serving environment, the likes of The GIMP, Inkscape, Digikam, Blender all of whom with that infusion would have made a much greater financial boon to Linux, never mind Scribus [another obvious duh] and you folks pissed roughly $25 million+ on fucking Nepomuk?

Too goddamn hilarious.

[CTown]

I know this is just semantics (pun intended) but according to KDE's community wiki "Baloo is the next generation of the Nepomuk project." As said in the article, Baloo does reuse Nepomuk code. Also, it seems to have the same goals as Nepomuk but goes in a completely different direction to reach that goal; which seems to be mainly dropping RDF support as a way to maintain how files how are related. It seems that RDF cannot be efficient enough. It also seems that Baloo wants to avoid data duplication; especially with Akonadi (one of KDE's pillars). For instance, according to the mailing list post that Micheal links to, there was just a process to sync the PIM data for Akonadai and Nepomuk. So, now KDE's sementic (remember the pun from earlier) desktop is still improving even though it has been so much better over the past two years or so compared to four years ago.

KDE did not get 17 million euros to make Nepomuk. There are many implementations of Nepomuk and KDE only has one of those implementations (called Nepomuk-kde). As can be seen on the Nepomuk web site people from KDE have been involved in Nepomuk since 2006. Perhaps, the reason that Baloo got a name change was due to the fact that it doesn't make use of RDF like the actual NEPOMUK project. I guess with KDE Framworks 5, Baloo will be turned into a Qt 5 library that will depend on other KDE Frameworks as little as possible.

In short: Baloo is just Nepomuk after years of real life experience. Also, this page that explains the architcture of Baloo.