When a machine is first booted and indexing begins, performance may be reduced, and files won't display complete metadata until it's done. However this is not obvious to the user. On macOS, a persistent notification is shown to communicate this information, after years and years of users complaining about it. We might want to consider doing the same, and when indexing is started for the very first time, display a persistent notification informing the user that until indexing is done, performance may be impacted and extended file metadata won't be available. This notification could even have a button to pause the indexing (to accommodate users with immediate performance needs) and a button to open the KCM for configuring the indexing behavior.
We had that in the Nepomuk days, even with a tray icon but imho the user shouldn't be aware of this in any way, both by not having a notification, and by not having system performance be degraded. And I definitely do not want to see a *persistent* notification for that. I kinda start to regret making persistent notifications a thing again tbh.
Well, in cases like this, IMO we can either fix or minimize the problem (i.e. that initial indexing can slow down the system down and you won't see extended metadata until it's done), or we can inform the user about what's going on so they don't have a bad first impression. Maybe we can improve the indexing behavior, and maybe a persistent notification isn't the best way to inform the user, but IMO we do need to do something.
As I mentioned in the bug 409876, properties is visible instantly on external drives. As far as I know, in that case indexation is turned off. In addition another person also mentioned that disabled indexation makes properties visible instantly. Why do I need to activate re-indexing manually or restart my system if indexation is enabled to see additional metadata in new files? Why does displaying metadata work immediately for external devices or just places where indexing is off? Maybe it would be possible to display properties without waiting also in the case of indexation enabled? It is possible that there is some other mechanism in those cases and there were some specific reasons why it works as it works. Thanks for clarification.
IIRC what happens is that when Baloo is off, and for paths that Baloo doesn't index, instead KFileMetadata itself does a little bit of extraction (i.e. not everything that Baloo will get). What might make sense is to always display the KFileMetadata-extracted properties during indexing, and then only replace that information with the Baloo-extracted information for each individual file as it gets indexed. That would definitely be a nice UX improvement. Can you file a bug for frameworks-baloo that requests this? Thanks
I created a bug 410114. Thanks!
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 399365 ***