When I installed Linux Mint 20.2 Uma for my kids, I was immediately struck that the search panel in Nemo now had a search by contents field.
I work pretty hard to keep my work organized, but there are still times when I can’t quite lay my finger on something I’m looking for, so I upgraded to 20.2 as quickly as was possible (I had been running 20.1)
I figured that I had better take the fetters off of tracker
and its kin — after all, a file and content search technology that’s part of the Gnome project would surely be the heart of any similar feature of Nemo, right?
Well, after several weeks of having at least one CPU core pegged 24/7, I decided to do some more research. As far as I can determine, tracker
is basically an unwanted orphan. Tracker-GUI, the configuration panel for the utility, is gone from the supported repos (and even in Ubuntu, upstream from Mint).
Clutching my courage with both hands (at the prospect of having to redo those weeks of unprofitable cryptic churning) I reset the tracker
database, wiping out its indexes and shutting down its processes. ( tracker daemon -t
to terminate all the tracker processes and tracker reset -r
to wipe the data cache )
Finally, I typed in sudo apt remove tracker
and found, to my delight, that it only removed tracker and its attendants (tracker-miner and tracker-extract). Then, I hopped in to Nemo and did a search for some text I knew existed inside one of the files in a particular folder. Success! After a relatively short time, the window began to be populated with corresponding files.
Above all, I no longer have a mammoth processor hog flailing about, not to mention the disk usage and memory.
So, if you’re concerned that removing tracker
from your Linux Mint 20.2 installation will negatively affect Nemo’s search capabilities, worry no more! Go ahead and uninstall the little beast!