Hacker News Reader

Comment by dmitrybrant | Hacker News Reader

One of my first tasks after a clean install of Windows is to disable any unnecessary services, including the Search Indexer. Not only do I disable the service itself, but I also explicitly remove all folders from the "indexed locations" control panel, and explicitly disable the "Allow files to be indexed" bit on the disk itself.

I've literally never needed to search my disk for a file (using the Windows search interface), and if I ever do, I'd rather wait a few more seconds that one time for my search to complete, rather than have the indexer consume my CPU at all times.

View on HN

It would be acceptable if windows search worked well and was fast -- but it's not. I search for something and it still churns the file system looking for my search query. What is the point of all that indexing if it still seems to always traverse the fs for each search!? By comparison, a third party search application [1] gives me results as soon as my key lifts and doesn't excessively index (at least for me). [1] https://www.voidtools.com/

A reindex of my entire drive in Voidtools Everything is substantially faster than a search in Windows Explorer over that drive.

That does speak to the remarkable efficiency of Voidtools Everything, as I understand it they don't use Window's filesystem stack but parse the NTFS partition directly. And I get that the Windows indexer is technically more powerful because it indexes file metadata like author etc. I still don't get what makes Windows search this slow.

If you use Windows as a daily driver, Voidtools' Everything should be in your top 10 first apps to install (or in your install script...). I have been using it for the better part of a decade, no issues, no resource consumption, just lightning fast searching for files of all drives on your system.

My PC had been fine before the updates (hence not updating until I needed some other thing to work), and I'd never seen Search Indexer pop up in Task Manager in any notable way. something tells me that I might just have a broken version of it, and since Windows Update also looks to be a bit broken, I may just be SOL for the near future.

This set of problems may be obviated by actually getting Manjaro to cooperate. It's on the todo list.

Try out Fedora! There's Fedora Rawhide if you want rolling release.

I have been using Rawhide (+ mainline, non rc or git, kernel) on my work machine for the past 6 months without issue.

If you have to compile a lot of kmods it can be a pain as everything is transitioning to GCC12 but the kernels are still built with GCC11. A container can take care of that though.

I really want to like Fedora - it gets so much right. But: `yum` is the worst package manager I have ever used on linux by far, and that sours the whole experience. I wish I could get "Fedora with pacman/apt instead".

Hm, maybe try using Nix alongside it?

dnf replaced yum I believe. dnf is certainly much nicer than pacman, it's slower but does a lot more to ensure your system actually works.

dnf is what replaced yum, and it's alright.

yum is still aliased on most fedora / rhel systems so you can put Fedora 35 on a drive and run yum update -y and it'll kick off the associated dnf process.

Why is it the worst package manager?

I haven't used it since ~2005, but at that time it was inexcusably slow. Notably, remarkably, shockingly slow. I would dread invoking it, it was so slow. 10x the time to do many operations, as apt/dpkg, and that's not an exaggeration.

I assume that got better, though. I hope it did.

That "yum" no longer exists. dnf has a "yum" alias so that scripts still work, and a lot of the commands are named the same and accept the same arguments, but that's basically where the similarity ends.

And yes DNF is much faster.

Fedora hasn't used "yum" in 7 years (although the alias still exists). I'm curious whether you've ever actually used Fedora.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com