I actually don’t have a preference. I usually just use the default locate implementation my distribution provides. I used mlocate before and when the distros switched to plocate, I rolled along with that without making efforts installing mlocate from a different source. Its the easiest and safest way to me. Usage and performance between mlocate and plocate seems to be identical in my experience (no benchmark, just how it “felt”). plocate is actually mlocate with a few patches for edge cases, if I understand it right.

I have it currently uninstalled due to an issue:

However, recently I had some issues with the locate and KDEs baloo (baloo can do content indexing too but I set it to only filename indexing, so its similar to locate). Those tools may have killed my previous system SSD and on my new one I noticed they used up Gigabytes of RAM and seem to be stuck. After investigating both tools seem to have choked on few filenames that contain unusual characters. Therefore I have disabled them for now until figured out how to deal with this (probably renaming) and try later again.

They do. You look at it every time you see the contents of your disk. It’s just organised in a tree to make path based lookups fast and locate organises its database differently to make fast basename lookups.

I guess because that adds extra complexity that isn’t inherently necessary and can be added on top, plus it eats resources. You’ll spend the cycles either way basically, at least this way it’s optional. I don’t bother with a file indexer because with SSDs nowadays, find is pretty fast, and how often do you search for files anyway?

Linux has APIs to get notified on file system events (fanotify, inotify) which would allow such a service to update itself whenever files are created/delete immediately, but locate is way older than that, from the 80s. I think popular DEs have something like that.

There’s also ways to search for specific files that come with packages (e.g. dpkg -S), because the package manager already maintains an index of files that were installed by it, so you can use that for most stuff outside /home.

find /pics/ -type f \( -iname '*.jpg' -o -iname '*.jpeg' -o -iname '*.png' \) \
  -exec exiftool -ExposureTime -T {} \; -exec bash -c '
    file="$1"
    exposure="$2"

    # Convert exposure to decimal
    if [[ "$exposure" =~ ^([0-9]+)/([0-9]+)$ ]]; then
        num="${BASH_REMATCH[1]}"
        denom="${BASH_REMATCH[2]}"
        exposure_val=$(echo "$num / $denom" | bc -l)
    else
        exposure_val="$exposure"
    fi

    # Filter by exposure between 1/100 and 1/20 seconds
    if (( $(echo "$exposure_val >= 0.01" | bc -l) )) && (( $(echo "$exposure_val <= 0.05" | bc -l) )); then
        atime=$(stat -c %X "$file")  # Access time (epoch)
        echo "$atime $file"
    fi
  ' bash {} $(exiftool -s3 -ExposureTime {}) | sort -nr