How to turn off baloo in KDE 4.13?

You can make your file manager display hidden files, after which go to $HOME/.kde/share/config/baloofilerc. It is enough to edit it and change the option

Indexing-Enabled=true 

to (or add if there is not such option)

Indexing-Enabled=false

to disable baloo.

I know it is way too easy but it did work for me and also for the guy who posted this simple solution on this page.

Disabling Akonadi server and Nepomuk search plugin can greatly increase performance in a KDE environment.

Baloo is responsible for desktop search.

Quoting one of the Baloo authors:

There is no explicit “Enable/Disable” button any more. We would like to promote the use of searching and feel that Baloo should never get in the users way. However, we are smart about it and IF you add your HOME directory to the list of “excluded folders”, Baloo will switch itself off since it no longer has anything to index.

From the Gentoo forum: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-7522240.html

As of KDE 4.13.0 (Kubuntu Trusty) it is no longer possible to disable Semantic Desktop in the GUI. Though there is a "Desktop Search" applet in the System Settings, and you should be able to blacklist your home dir there, doing so has no effect and Baloo (who has taken over from Nepomuk/Strigi) keeps doing its stuff with 100% load and multi-Gigabyte memory use on the CPU core it runs in.

You may check the CPU load on your system using 'top':

top

Check the I/O load on your system with 'iotop':

sudo apt-get install iotop
sudo iotop

To permanently disable baloo, symlink it to /bin/true:

sudo mv /usr/bin/baloo_file_extractor /usr/bin/baloo_file_extractor.orig
sudo ln -s /bin/true /usr/bin/baloo_file_extractor

and

sudo mv /usr/bin/baloo_file_cleaner /usr/bin/baloo_file_cleaner.orig
sudo ln -s /bin/true /usr/bin/baloo_file_cleaner

This will prevent it from ever running again. Doing so will lose search functionality of course, but does not seem to have any adverse effects beyond that.

To avoid manually editing $HOME/.kde/share/config/baloofilerc, this does the same for you:

kwriteconfig --file baloofilerc --group 'Basic Settings' --key 'Indexing-Enabled' false