I’m a new user of that promising distro. I recently installed Clear Linux* from the clear-30490-live-server image then manually installed the desktop bundle. To launch Gnome Shell I had to manually enable the gdm.service.
The problem is that Gnome Music, Photos and Videos apps are unable to retrieve their respective XDG_*_DIR content.
Looks like this issue is caused by the broken install of the Gnome Tracker component which miss his hard dependencies such as tracker-extract and tracker-miner-fs which should be located in /usr/libexec.
Gnome ecosystem and especially applications above rely heavily on Tracker. So if it doesn’t work, the Gnome experience is quite spoiled…
So I wonder, is that broken install of Tracker the packager’s choice or would I still have this issue if I installed Clear Linux* via the clear-30490-live-desktop instead?
We’ve discussed this issue I believe on github and maybe in other threads:
tracker is invasive and many pieces of software will cause it to start without consent, and eat your CPU time, causing performance issues.
Because we can’t easilly disable it until a user says “yes go ahead eat all my CPU” explicitly, we’ve disabled it entirely.
Upstream ought to really fix this so that people are actually aware of the cost of miner threads. I’ll take patches that improve things, though, and merge them in clearlinux, if people in the community have the time.
I’d ask @mesiment but I know he’s got quite the backlog already.
Hi @ahkok, thanks for your reply. I see your team spending lot of time on this forum, which is a good sign, users such as myself may appreciate much.
Because we can’t easilly disable it until a user says “yes go ahead eat all my CPU” explicitly, we’ve disabled it entirely.
Well, if we can’t afford to let it eat some CPU while we are on Clear Linux, then what while we are on another distro? Isn’t the point of such optimized distro keeping the resources free as much as possible for the user’s use cases (bundles) to consume them? Or why would we need resources?
If a user wants Gnome, I guess that he wants a functional Gnome. If it’s too costly for his resources then he may not even choose Gnome as DE in first place…
I mean not even necessarily to enable Tracker by default, but at least allowing the user to seems the most fair. But how to disable it by default without breaking the component?
I would like to help technically the community in this issue but don’t know how.
I see we have the 2 miners in a separate package. I’m looking to see if we can offer this as a separate bundle that isn’t part of any dependency chain. That way, a user that wants these can install them with swupd, and that would be reasonable.
