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People here seem to think that you are looking for another email client. Instead, it appears to me that what you really need is a way to archive and search your local machine. In light of that, take a look at http://beagle-project.org/ Beagle can search your IMAP stuff and local file system stuff too. I run Ubuntu so the UX for installing, configuring, indexing, and searching with Beagle is pretty easy. Beagle is available in the Ubuntu Software Center. You can search from either the command line or from the firefox search bar once you have configured that.

I also think that Apple can't afford to not do this. They have been forced to reduce their prices on their hardware, eating away their margins.

I guess you just missed Apple's Q3 Earnings report, then. Sorry they didn't call you in your Mom's basement.

There are a large number of things that I hate Apple products for, the desktop environment that does not lend itself to heavy multitasking (from a user perspective)

I don't know where your "information" comes from; but OS X multitasks JUST fine. One time, simply as a test, I simultaneously encoded video, watched other video (including that CPU-hogging Flash shit), browsed, and listened to iTunes with a visualizer running, and compiled an XCode project, all without the slightest hiccup in UI performance or slowdown in other functionality, on my 5 year old 1.8GHz G5 DP, with only 1.25GB of RAM. Therefore, I'd say that OS X does heavy multitasking at least as good as any other OS. Don't whine about thread creation overhead and the like; what matters is how responsive the system remains TO THE USER. Apple has really figured out how to prioritize tasks.

Apple stuff is easy for simple users.

That's a meme that needs to die once and for all.

I am an embedded developer with over thirty years' experience. Now call me "simple".

And, in case you haven't noticed, Apple has an incredible presence among academics, and a pretty strong (and growing) following among IT professionals, and software and web devs, too. I guess they're all "simple users", too, eh?

poorly organized layout which makes Spotlight the main way to access your files and programs

You do mean the same Volume -> Directory -> File structure that EVERY filesystem has used since, well, since their were hierarchical file systems, right?

Actually Spotlight was created because Apple realized that the WHOLE PARADIGM was getting too unweildy, and that hard drives were getting too large, for the old heirarchy to work (for anyone at all). Perhaps Microsoft agreed, because they went right out and copied it immediately for Visturd (and Win 7, I assume).

Oh, and the Linux guys must think their "layout" is pretty "poorly organized", because Beagle is a direct Spotlight clone. I do notice, however, like many, many Free software projects, it is now languishing (due to lack of financial support, no doubt).

So now what, fucktard?

Or how about, why on earth would I use something like CVS for files (movies, mp3 files, photos of my kids) that can be quite large and will never change?

I too am looking for things to help manage the huge piles of various files I have accumulated and am leaning towards something like beagle http://beagle-project.org/Main_Page and rsync/unison for backups.

Ultimately though I think dividing my files up into meaningful directories is a good start, especially if I start by putting everything that doesn't change into a subdirectory of a main directory named "Static".

It may be worth looking at Beagle: http://beagle-project.org/ - it's Linux only though.

Yes, Linux is a great OS, but it simply doesn't have photoshop or anything that compares to it. GIMP is a clumsy hack and is frankly like Paint in comparison.

Compared to Photoshop, Gimp might be like Paint, but compared to Paint, Gimp really is like Photoshop :-)

Gnome, KDE and Explorer have nothing on the frankly revolutionary changes Mac has seamlessly implemented in the last few years. There are a lot of poorly implemented whizbang features like Time Machine's GUI or Safari 4's Top Pages, but there are also features like Spotlight, Expose, the new stacks in the Dock, and Quick Look.

Maybe you can check out

• Beagle
• Compiz
• Cairo-Dock
• gloobus

Call me back when Linux works with my hardware out of the box

Call me back when you buy hardware that works with Linux. :-)

They want us dead, you can't compromise with that.

So, the only thing that stops you from running a fantastic app like Beagle (for example) is your own paranoia? And anyone who doesn't automatically distrust Miguel de Icaza, a visionary who has almost certainly done more for open source development than you have, must have faulty judgment?

You need to get out more.

It seems as though people here haven't heard of Beagle[1] and Tracker[2].

1. http://beagle-project.org/
2. http://www.gnome.org/projects/tracker/

The other issue is whether Beagle is useful for PDFs and CHM files. Strangely enough it is -- it will index the contents of both. Yes, ?it does index CHM files! So it seems Beagle does all the things you want it to do already, so apparently it is useful to you, if you would actually bother to use it.

I don't think that's a fair characterization. I run beagle on some quite old hardware and while there might be some slowdown while indexing (crappy IDE pretty much slows everything down when random disk access occurs) it is overall quite fast and not at all a resource hog. Unless if you count 28MB of memory as resource hogging.

I have on the other hand been bit by bugs in both beagle and meta tracker where they seem to get stuck in infinite loops indexing the same data over and over again, or decide for some unknown reason not to index a particular file. Beagle seems to have gotten better at this lately, still waiting for a new release of tracker to test and see if it's got some of these little bugs fixed.

Strigi is a fast and good search program, and it will be part of KDE 4 (it's still desktop-neutral, however). There's also Beagle which supports more file formats and whatnot, but it requires mono (C#) to run and is a bit of a resource hog.

Beagle runs much better if you are using extended attributes, http://beagle-project.org/FAQ "Do I really need extended attributes? It is strongly recommended. There is an sqlite-based fallback in place, but using this as the primary store is slow and noticably degrades performance. Note that, with extended attributes. beagle will use some extra space for storing the attributes of each file. It depends on the filesystem how much is used for each attribute and it is a small amount. However, it can add up to some 10s of MBs for several GBs of files. Also, writing extended attributes changes the ctime of a file; this might cause problem if you are using any backup utility that compares ctime to backup changed files. If you want to run with extended attributes disabled, set the environment variale BEAGLE_DISABLE_XATTR. Keep in mind that beagle will run slower with extended attribute disabled. "

From the linked blog post: For most Linux users, looking for files, documents, or emails usually involves some combination of 'find' and 'locate,' but sometimes these tools don't quite do what you're looking for, like finding that single PDF containing the specific topic you're looking for. Or you just wish there was a much easier way to find something than 'find /home/username -name '*.pdf' and 'pdftotext pdf_file_name.pdf output.txt...'

Or we use Beagle... Besides, using find, locate and stuff like pdftotext and detex is quite powerful, because you can't do stuff like 'locate libpng | grep ^/usr > libpng-list.txt' in neither Google Desktop, Beagle, Spotlight or whatever MS calls their search-thingy.

They have Beagle http://beagle-project.org/Main_Page to compete with, not sure how useful it will be on Linux. But on Windows at work I can finally find my emails and other documents!

In theory, Beagle does this for you. To quote: "Beagle is a Linux desktop-independent service which transparently and unobtrusively indexes your data in real-time."

In practice, when I tried it out (quite some time ago, though), I found the indexing to be a bit quirky and inconsistent. There's been lots of time for improvement since then, so I'd recommend giving it a try.

I agree with the "Spotlight Already Does That" posts. Keeping that in mind:

http://beagle-project.org/Main_Page

Haha, do you guys know that C# is an open standard, and so is CLI (.Net). I suggest you read the Mono FAQ, it will go over anything I can say a lot better.

I'm just surprised because I hear many people putting Mono and C# down pretty quickly when, when in fact thanks to these things, there have been quite a few innovative things done on the Desktop for Linux, including Banshee, Tomboy, Beagle, and many many more.

Typically the reason for such comments is either ignorance (I don't mean to troll, just trying to think of what can be the cause), as in, the people don't really know the situation, or just doing it because everyone else does it. There's a whole Mono section in the current issue of Linux Format Magazine which seems to kind of inform people on just how Mono is benefiting the Open Source community.

The point isn't for everyone to like it, but at least respect it, after all it's just another Open Source initiative/project and we all should stick together :) Just curious why there's such behavior/attitude towards it.

Beagle supports a search syntax similar to the major search engines you are probably familiar with. If you see too many results for a query, consider refining your search.

  Required words: By default, Beagle will return results containing all of the words you specify, with the exception of common "stop words" such as "a", "the", and "is".

  Phrases: To search for specific phrases (one word next to another), place the words in quotation marks. For example:

                    "White Album"

  Partial words: Beagle supports partial word searches using asterisks as wildcards. For example, to find words like "black", "blackbird", and "blacksmith":

                    black*

  Excluding words: To exclude a word or phrase from your search, prefix it with minus sign ("-"). For example, to find items with "Beatles" but not the word "George":

                    Beatles -George

  Optional words: To indicate that the word A or word B be in results, use OR, i.e. to find items which contain either "George" or "Ringo" (or both). The OR is case-sensitive.

                    George OR Ringo

  Property queries: By default, Beagle looks for your search terms in the text of the documents and their metadata. If you want to search for a specific property, use the format property:keyword. You can find a list of supported properties by running beagle-query --keywords. Property queries follow all the rules mentioned above; so you can search for properties by phrase, using wildcards, exclude terms, or provide optional terms. For example, the following query will return all of your Beatles MP3s or Ogg/Vorbis files that aren't on the Abbey Road album:

                    artist:Beatles ext:mp3 OR ext:ogg -album:"Abbey Road"

  Searching file extensions: You can use either *.mp3 or ext:mp3 to search for documents by file extension. (In this example, MP3s.)

Beagle supports a search syntax similar to the major search engines you are probably familiar with. If you see too many results for a query, consider refining your search.

  Required words: By default, Beagle will return results containing all of the words you specify, with the exception of common "stop words" such as "a", "the", and "is".

  Phrases: To search for specific phrases (one word next to another), place the words in quotation marks. For example:

                    "White Album"

  Partial words: Beagle supports partial word searches using asterisks as wildcards. For example, to find words like "black", "blackbird", and "blacksmith":

                    black*

  Excluding words: To exclude a word or phrase from your search, prefix it with minus sign ("-"). For example, to find items with "Beatles" but not the word "George":

                    Beatles -George

  Optional words: To indicate that the word A or word B be in results, use OR, i.e. to find items which contain either "George" or "Ringo" (or both). The OR is case-sensitive.

                    George OR Ringo

  Property queries: By default, Beagle looks for your search terms in the text of the documents and their metadata. If you want to search for a specific property, use the format property:keyword. You can find a list of supported properties by running beagle-query --keywords. Property queries follow all the rules mentioned above; so you can search for properties by phrase, using wildcards, exclude terms, or provide optional terms. For example, the following query will return all of your Beatles MP3s or Ogg/Vorbis files that aren't on the Abbey Road album:

                    artist:Beatles ext:mp3 OR ext:ogg -album:"Abbey Road"

  Searching file extensions: You can use either *.mp3 or ext:mp3 to search for documents by file extension. (In this example, MP3s.)

where's Spotlight in Linux?

Beagle.

Where's the email app with spotlight-like search?

Beagle can search email, and plenty more.

And if that's not enough, although it hasn't been written yet, it seems possible -- even easy -- to write an IMAP server with Spotlight-like responsiveness. Since IMAP allows you to search on the server, this means you'd have that lightning-fast search from anywhere, not just your Beagle-enabled Linux or Spotlight-enabled Mac.

Why does my USB key does not load in Debian while it works flawlessly on OS X (or even XP) (it's probably related to our corporate Debian installation, but it just shows Linux has rough corners).

Bullshit, you do not get to say "Linux has rough corners" on that basis. You get to say "our corporate Debian installation has rough corners".

My USB key -- in fact, damn-near any USB device -- loads flawlessly in Gentoo, but not automatically -- I have to mount it. However, plug it into a fresh Ubuntu, and it's mounted on your desktop in about the same amount of time it'd take to do in OS X. Added bonus is, it'll work for filesystems Linux supports, but OS X doesn't.

Where's the default Expose-like windows switching?

Why does it have to be default?

I mean, I like OS X's defaults, but even there, I have to tweak some things. I am not going to hit fn+f9 to use Expose (f9 is mapped to keyboard brightness on my Powerbook), so I mapped it to something else. Unfortunately, OS X forgets this keyboard mapping on every reboot.

Personally, I never used Expose much, once I got used to virtual desktops (or workspaces, or Spaces, take your pick) -- and while I did eventually find a replacement on OS X, it has plenty of glitches.

So, something like this may exist -- if it does, it's probably part of Beryl -- but I don't know about it, and I don't care much right now.

But it's not true that Linux has the perfect mix of features for all users.

Perfect? No, nothing's perfect. But I do think Linux is the best we've got right now.

where's Spotlight in Linux?

Beagle.

Where's the email app with spotlight-like search?

Beagle can search email, and plenty more.

And if that's not enough, although it hasn't been written yet, it seems possible -- even easy -- to write an IMAP server with Spotlight-like responsiveness. Since IMAP allows you to search on the server, this means you'd have that lightning-fast search from anywhere, not just your Beagle-enabled Linux or Spotlight-enabled Mac.

Why does my USB key does not load in Debian while it works flawlessly on OS X (or even XP) (it's probably related to our corporate Debian installation, but it just shows Linux has rough corners).

Bullshit, you do not get to say "Linux has rough corners" on that basis. You get to say "our corporate Debian installation has rough corners".

My USB key -- in fact, damn-near any USB device -- loads flawlessly in Gentoo, but not automatically -- I have to mount it. However, plug it into a fresh Ubuntu, and it's mounted on your desktop in about the same amount of time it'd take to do in OS X. Added bonus is, it'll work for filesystems Linux supports, but OS X doesn't.

Where's the default Expose-like windows switching?

Why does it have to be default?

I mean, I like OS X's defaults, but even there, I have to tweak some things. I am not going to hit fn+f9 to use Expose (f9 is mapped to keyboard brightness on my Powerbook), so I mapped it to something else. Unfortunately, OS X forgets this keyboard mapping on every reboot.

Personally, I never used Expose much, once I got used to virtual desktops (or workspaces, or Spaces, take your pick) -- and while I did eventually find a replacement on OS X, it has plenty of glitches.

So, something like this may exist -- if it does, it's probably part of Beryl -- but I don't know about it, and I don't care much right now.

But it's not true that Linux has the perfect mix of features for all users.

Perfect? No, nothing's perfect. But I do think Linux is the best we've got right now.

Beagle is one of the coolest tools available for Linux desktops and it requires xattrs on indexed filesystems, so yes, my /home and / have xattrs enabled.

1. Remove popup (immediate switch) when using right mouse-button & mouse wheel to switch tab.
2. Trails when performing mouse-gestures.
3. Beagle support http://beagle-project.org/.
4. Privacy-mode (No records are kept while enabled).
5. Strict-mode (While enabled pages have to be perfect to be displayed).
6. Native Look-And-Feel.

What else is new, this is MS, after all. On the up side...Beagle wins!

There is a open source linux desktop search ... http://www.beagle-project.org/Main_Page/

So maybe building a full blown distro that competes against Redhat and Suse is unlikely... but I could definitly see Google making major feature enhancements in the linux desktop search realm.

While it's true that I can search gMail, Beagle indexes and collates *everything* so when I search it hits my email, my im logs, my music collections, text files in directories I choose, code... etc. So I'd rather get all of the information there than search gMail, and use ten other apps to look through my stuff.

As a student, all I have to do is search my email for "Exam" and up pops the emails I've gotten from my professors about when their exams are. Or "ACM" to find out when I have the next ACM meeting. Particularly useful for mailing lists, search your email for your problem and you'll find an answer if it's in the mailing list.