First, I will start off with some praises. Google Desktop “LOOKS” promising, it does index quite fast, very small CPU footprint when running.
Now, it is time I let you have it a little. And if you do happen upon this post, don’t email me or comment with excuses. Excuses and opinions are like assholes, everybody has one.
First off you admit that this new release contains “some” of the features that the first release for Windows did. Seems kind of odd that you would releases something that isn’t even as feature rich as your first Windows release, but hey, you did release one, so I am going to somewhat give you the benefit of the doubt.
Secondly, where is the source? You claim that you support open source and preach it, yes you Chris, yet I don’t see the source. I even added deb-src to my sources.list hoping there was a chance I could see your source package. Nope, 404 baby! OK, I can give you that one, so hey, let me check your link to the Google code page, and look for the source there. Nope, not there, but oddly enough you mirror real free software and open source packages. GCC and OpenSSL to name a couple. Granted some people don’t care to see the source, but then again there are some who do, me being one of them.
Thirdly, what the hell are you thinking with your freakin’ menu setup? Who told you that we want Google Desktop as a top level menu? One word, oh should I say link? FREEDESKTOP.ORG! And if your Debian packagers at Google were as good as I have heard, they would know about menus.
Fourthly, a man page would be nice, but hey who uses the command line anyways?
Fifthly, I understand why no source now. I click on preferences and instead of popping up a local preference dialog, I am taken to a google.com web page webpage that looks like google.com for my preferences. And look at that, there is my directory structure listed smack dab at the top. And also when I set preferences or index, tcp ports are opened to google.com. So, that makes me wonder. No source code, preferences are web based, leading me to believe that a) you are doing more snooping than you should be, or b) refer to a.
So Google, are you the first Spy Ware application for Linux? I think you are! Now get off my damn system and shoo fly!
Linux users around the world that may not know, but Linux already has what Google is attempting, and guess what? It is free and open. I am talking about Beagle and Strigi. Beagle is the prettiest, and Strigi is the fastest. Both are available in the Ubuntu repositories, and more than likely, in every distributions repositories.
UPDATE: I apologize for booging the “Fithly”. I stated I was taken to a google.com webpage when I wasn’t. What I meant to say was that setting preferences and even indexing, netstat -a shows google.com tcp connections. I have added and edited the correctness into the post above.