[lhl]

Sorry, locate is not even comparable to what Spotlight does. Do a search for mdfind(1) to get an idea of what is does. Recoll is the only thing I found on Linux being actively developed that comes close, but it's definitely not as polished or flexible. I'm primarily running Arch these days, but there are some things that Linux just has no good equivalent for.

[wINfo]

But the opportunity cost is never having a true enterprise class file-system. If you look at Linux, OpenSolaris (and it's derivatives), BSD and yes even modern Windows in terms of core technology and performance their file-systems are generations ahead of OSX. What shocks me is that given the BSD lineage of OSX that is hasn't switched to ZFS yet given how Apple prides itself on being the "best of the best" of computing world.

But you want your mdfind and Spotlight so you have to be okay with giving up ZFS or another enterprise-class Linux/UNIX file-system!

[lhl]

While that may be a valid point on some glasses-bridge-pushing technical level (certainly Linus has strong opinions on HFS), but so what? In practice, this hasn't been an issue (I spent about 15 years running OSX desktop workstations and laptops, and and also managed a fleet up to 50 OSX client machines in very shady power situations w/o problems) - sure ZFS is technically sweet but doesn't make sense on a laptop (OpenSolaris, BSD on the go? please) and has historically been a PITA on Linux (CDDL).

What other enterprise-class file system are you talking about? btrfs is still immature, anytime I've strayed from ext, I regret it. And NTFS? I've had lots of more problems w/ that than anything else (admittedly, probably due to poor interactions between Windows and ntfs-3g on Linux).

In any case, since OSX isn't a data-center OS, I don't see what "enterprise-class" storage has to do with it anyway.

[hackercomplex]

But at what cost ? What about the mdworker slowdown effect which can quite arbitrarily bring your workflow to a standstill ? On your hardware does mdworker increase the probability of experiencing a "beachball of doom" depending on what else you have running ?

[microtonal]

I think I only had a noticeable mdworker problem (stuck process) once in my nine years of using Macs. Maybe I'm lucky to have had SSDs for a long time, but mdworker is something I rarely notice (in contrast to storedownloadd and others).

I think I use Spotlight almost a couple of dozen times each day to find documents, applications, and sometimes e-mails. So the productivity gains outnumber the marginal cost enormously.

Also, there is a healthy ecosystem around Spotlight. E.g., I use Alfred, which allows you to define use/custom workflows.

BTW. If you use Alfred, this is one of the nicest workflows I found recently: https://github.com/bevesce/unicode-symbols-search

[lhl]

Yeah, I've had occasional mdworker issues, which was much more of an issue on battery-life than anything else. I had a bunch of launchctl shortcuts to disable a number of things when in battery mode (especially since Yosemite seemed like a big regression). What finally got me to switch, however, was mostly the out of control explosion network usage. I made a list of the network services that would run unbidden on my system: https://randomfoo.hackpad.com/OS-X-vs-Linux-JlyTLOwSWOG

(Ironically, by far the worst offender was Google's ksfetch - it had a psychic ability to know when I was on an airplane, and start its unkill9able update process (again, launchctl)).

Of course, there are costs for running Linux on the desktop as well. My original Ubuntu setup had many problems (its kernels were not Skylake friendly last year) and eventually apt got into a crazy situation with some ppa's (never a problem on my servers, since I run LTS exclusively). I ended up switching to Arch, and got it working how I liked, but not without a literal month of yak-shaving. I documented it here: https://paper.dropbox.com/doc/Arch-Linux-Install-Uf1RAzNYBU3 I've been poking around with Linux since the mid-90s, but even I can't help but shake my head at some of these things.