So all of this tells me that tracker isn't a replacement for typeahead
search. They have two entirely different use cases:

 * Typeahead search only affects the currently displayed directory (or
should anyway -- you search through what you see, not through the
entirety of the file system). It is fast as it's only one readdir(), and
nautilus already did that as it's displaying at least the first portion
of the directory and there is no need to stat() the individual files. It
also needs to be instant and correct even when I just copied a large
directory from somewhere else or am looking at a remote sftp/cifs
directory, and work everywhere.

 * Tracker imposes a huge cost due to always indexing everything (even
if you never search for it). It's good for tasks like "where did I put
my files last week". However, it is necessarily only approximate, as it
has some delay (which can be quite large if you are on battery, or just
copied a large bunch of files), and not universal (non-XDG directories,
remote file systems), etc.

So I don't see how "enable tracker" can ever be a replacement for
typeahead search, and TBH I still don't buy that we have to penalize
each and every installation with the tracker overhead even though most
people don't do full-hard disk searches all the time (and many don't do
this at all). And if you do need a "search through my home dir", you
*still* need to do an actual search due to the latency/approximative
nature of indexing. It's not an acceptable answer to say "sorry, we
don't show the file you just downloaded as we didn't get to indexing it
yet".

I see tracker as a nice opt-in (!) feature for people who often do full
searches, so this might become a checkbox in the search box?

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1666676

Title:
  Enable tracker by default for Unity too

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