SUMMARY Dolphin hides both "Recently saved" and "Search for" sections of its places panel when baloo is disabled because such sections depend on baloo. However the same does not occur with "Assign tags" feature which also depends on baloo. It is still available in the context menu even when baloo is disabled. STEPS TO REPRODUCE 1. run "balooctl disable" to disable baloo 2. open dolphin, right click on any file/folder 3. OBSERVED RESULT "Assign tags" feature is still available in the context menu and it does not work EXPECTED RESULT "Assign tags" feature is hidden SOFTWARE/OS VERSIONS Operating System: Arch Linux KDE Plasma Version: 5.15.4 KDE Frameworks Version: 5.57.0 Qt Version: 5.13.0 beta2
Tags are dependent on XAttrs, but baloo is only auxiliary. You can not search for tags (at least not very efficiently), but you can still add or remove tags.
The relevant features have now been made available when Baloo isn't active (in Frameworks 5.58 and Apps 19.08.0), so there's no longer a need for the original request to be implemented.