Tons of people ask how to disable baloo. Some jokers say to uninstall dolphin (that’s a silly notion). There are many reasons for why someone wants to remove baloo. The most common reason seems to be that many are frustrated with the performance impact that it has on their computer.
This brings me to support help/suggestions from the Internet. The problem that I encounter most in reading Linux support suggestions is that so many people suggest the same solution. That’s fine, however most people give you incomplete suggestions. They often leave things out (such as the paths to folder/files), and often they fail to state which program is used to remove/disable/edit — fix.
Why did I want to remove baloo? In my case my computer would freeze every minute or two. It would return control only to freeze again a minute or so later. If I tried to open my home folder in dolphin (the file manager similar to Microsoft’s file explorer) would take forever to load. If I launched system settings in KDE Plasma it would take forever. It looked like the border of the window would be shown yet the body of the window would be blank until the computer unfroze. The cursor didn’t freeze only the display of some windows were inhibited.
To figure this out I went into a terminal window and typed “htop”. This showed that “baloo_file_extractor” was using 100% of the CPU utilization. I then decided to disable that. I needed to find out how. So, I looked for an answer on the Internet and found where someone suggested the command “balooctl disable”, which happens to be the top suggestion. The command “balooctl status” gives you the status of the service.
I ran the “balooctl disable” command. The output stated it disabled it. When I checked the status with “balooctl status” it stated it was still running. I rebooted and checked again. Per the balooctl status command it was no longer running, but the performance was still very bad.
Someone stated that they’d removed all the baloo support/config files (they didn’t say where they removed them from nor which files they removed). The correct location on Manjaro Linux is ~/.local/share/baloo.
When I looked there I found a rather large index file of 13GB. That’s a bit much so I deleted it, and I deleted the index.lock file.
Neither disabling baloo nor deleting the baloo files solved the problem. The performance was still horrible. I looked in htop again and saw the same baloo_file_extractor program using 100% of the CPU. I thought to myself that there must be something I’m missing as the file extractor should have been disabled when I disabled the baloo program. Since it hadn’t disabled this I rebooted again thinking it might be running until a reboot is done. When I did reboot I saw the same program running and still eating up all the CPU cycles.
I thought that there must be something else still that I haven’t uncovered. I chose to look at “krunner” for services. There was a file search option. When I clicked on it it took me to system settings (yes, the long delay again). Once it unfroze I turned off “dolphin search and file search”. When I looked for the services using htop it showed that baloo_file_extractor was no longer running.
Everything is back to being responsive again.