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

[phoronix]

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

It appears there isn't much of a future left to KDE's Nepomuk framework that was developed at a cost of 17 million Euros... It's going to be replaced going forward in the KDE land...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTYwNjM

[Baconmon]

My least favorite pokemon

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?..

[nirvanix]

Neposuks and Akoncrappi. Goodbye and riddance. Damn bloatware that they tried to shove down our throats.

[mmstick]

According to your article, Nepomuk does have a future: Baloo.

[BSDude]

17 million, dear lord, I hope some of the code finds it's way in Baloo otherwise such a waste of money!

[lano1106]

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.

KDE visual 3D effects are very nice but just useless when the apps are just broken by too complex middleware that have weird names.

[Alejandro Nova]

I was aware of this change back in December, I even installed and compiled Baloo and Milou, and, if you track the mailing list, the biggest fear of Vishesh Handa with this change was precisely this: that someone shouted "Nepomuk was killed". What indeed was killed is all the integration with Virtuoso, a SPARQL full server with a client/server model that made impossible to run Nepomuk in multi-user environments, and all the code derived from that. Baloo is going to use Xapian, is faster because it's smaller, but feature parity with Nepomuk is a goal.

So, no, guys, Nepomuk isn't gone. It is going to be replaced by something that does 80% of what the original Nepomuk did, using 20% of the resources (a good twist in the 80/20 rule)

BTW, try Baloo. I mean seriously, try it. Milou is a Spotlight clone and comes for free. Mail searching, file searching and contact parsing is lightning fast. You don't have to take my word for it, simply try it.

[Alejandro Nova]

Just forgot something quite important:

Baloo, now, is architecturally similar to Tracker, but it does more than Tracker, since it is designed to reach feature parity with Nepomuk. All this is done while eating significantly less CPU than Tracker (a great effort was spent optimizing the indexers, since Nepomuk was so slow, and Baloo simply reaps from that).

The question is: Will the Tracker devs join Baloo? Will they refuse to cooperate with Baloo? The reverse question has a simple answer, Baloo does more than Tracker, so Tracker cannot replace Baloo, but Baloo can, theoretically, replace Tracker.

[asdfblah]

Same here, I just hated nepomuk and akonadi.. I always wondered if they used mlocate, and if not... why. it's really cool and fast, they could have just added metadata on top of that database. nepomuk used to use LOTS of resources for no good reason (mysql? really?!?). And yes, when KDE4 came, I disabled it and moved to other DE. Now I'm back to KDE, and it's been great so far.

I've always had concerns with respect to my privacy, though... KDE itself is buggy and not very privacy-aware, I think, which means that anyone could have exploited any program and have access to my personal data easily. Call me crazy, but... I didn't see the nepomuk database as a good thing. 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.

[Ericg]

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

My documents folder is 1.5Gb comprised of school papers, 45 Pathfinder PDF's, personal writings, a handful of articles I had thought of submitting to Michael (only ever actually did The Wayland Situation) and a crap ton of other stuff. I'll also leave random text documents for myself as notes and reminders or how-to's for stuff. All of it IS neatly sorted, but its still more convenient to just search for the phrase or title of the file I'm looking for than traversing the directory tree.

Same thing with photos, its just easy to search for whatever I tagged it as or named it than it is to go through folders.

It really just depends on how many files you have to deal with, for me, yes, the indexing and tagging are VERY welcome features that I adore.



As far as whether or not Nepomuk is dead... Nepomuk itself IS dead. The ideas and code behind it? Not so much. But Nepomuk the collective term and overall project is dead.


And as far as whether or not Nepomuk was a resource hog... Originally, oh god yes. But in 4.9, 4.10 and 4.11 they really trimmed it down. The mailing list and related blogpost however did mention one giant kink in the software layers though: for some reason Nepomuk (and Virtuoso) fell flat on their face whenever they had to integrate with Akonadi and why was never really clearly explained. You could have JUST Nepomuk and Virtuoso without enabling Akonadi so it wasn't a major deal, but if you had Nepo and Akonadi both enabled then you had problems like people talked about, even after 4.11