Linux

Baloo is the file indexer for KDE. It has little or nothing to do with Akonadi.

Akonadi also hogs a lot of memory for services i never use (calendar and centralised mail service, not sure if thunderbirs uses them). It's not a problem for my desktop pc so i don't tinker with it, on my 8 year old laptop on the other hand I'm going to have to switch to something lighter in the future (lxqt or xfce).

Akonadi is a pig. Nearly 20 processes, each one using 20-150MB resident set (20-40MB unique set), multiplied by the number of users logged in. And then there's the other stuff it keeps resident, like mysqld.

That might be okay if I was getting something important from it, but I'm not. It provides zero value to me. It's just wasting RAM that I would rather use for other things.

Unfortunately, it's part of the Plasma dependency chain on my distro, so removing it would be problematic. When I find the time, I may build a custom metapackage to allow me to get rid of it without taking most of KDE with it.

Lol last time I tried KDE a few years ago, Akonadi kept crashing. It made the DE feel like a buggy mess (it is) so I uninstalled it.

Sad not much has changed since then

I'd love it if the KDE devs made Baloo and Akonadi optional. Their insistence on including them reminds me of Micro$oft's insistence on bundling Internet Explorer and integrating it into the OS shell in Windows 98.

Yeah, first thing I do on a new install is "balooctl disable".