the corner office

a blog, by Colin Pretorius

Ubuntu, pizza, bloat

Grumble grumble... I'm sitting here, quietly tinkering away, and I look up at my CPU monitor on my Gnome toolbar and notice that my machine's a little busier than it should be. I take a peek at the system monitor, and notice a process called trackerd is the chief CPU hog. A quick search and it turns out that this is a file system indexer. I recall reading something about this on the new feature list. Not very nice of Ubuntu to not even ask me if I want it running, but it wasn't hard to switch it off via the Indexing control panel dialog.

Whilst searching, I saw a good few forum and blog entries griping about the whole trackerd thing, since a great many people are seeing sluggish systems once this daemon gets going. A fairly common theme is 'Ubuntu is getting bloated'. If tracker-bloody-d is anything to go by, I'd have to agree. I guess it's just symptomatic of other things. It's not going to change, but it's disappointing that inevitable creaping featuritis, mixed with a healthy dose of 'let's dazzle Windows users with crap and hope they convert' is the order of the day with many of these ambitious, heavily marketed open-source projects.

For me, I should really just put some time aside, bump myself over to Xubuntu, or roll a leaner fluxbox desktop or the like, and be done with it. I like many of the Linuxey things you just can't get on a Windows box, but I must admit, I find myself getting increasingly more frustrated with Gnome. It's never been my favourite, but it's starting to really get to me.

I don't want all my posts to be grumbles and whinges though, so on a brighter note, tomorrow night is Friday night, which means pizza night! Mmm pizza.

{2007.10.26 00:21}

Comments:

1. Julian Robichaux (2007.10.26 - 12:37) #

You could try SimplyMepis too. The latest version uses the Ubuntu repositories, but it's KDE-based. I was playing around with the live CD the other day, and it was a nice distro. I was even able to get the 3-d Beryl desktop working running on an older machine while running from the live CD.

2. Colin (2007.10.26 - 23:49) #

Hrmm... I'll look into that, thanks!

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