OS\Zen

Ars Technica delivers another great operating system review, this time on everyone’s (myself included) favorite desktop Linux.

The heron has landed: a review of Ubuntu 8.04: Page 1: “”

Evidently the new built in search app Tracker is slow and returns lots of files that are irrelevant to the search. Ars says that Beagle is better, and is supported by more apps, but I’m thinking that Linux needs a more drastic change when it comes to built in search. Something along the lines of the Mac OS X fsevents. fsevents is kernel based, and tracks the changes to every file in the operating system. This makes spotlight very efficient, and very current… there’s never a need to re-index your system.

A built in search function like this would be great in Linux on the desktop, but I think it would be even more impressive on the server. Without doubt there would be a public api, one that could be used to collect the index from all servers on the network and offer one place to search through all files on all servers. This would be amazing for corporate file servers, although permissions would have to be worked out. I think its doable.