the corner office

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.