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NixOS is the best operating system I absolutely cannot recommend to anyone - Anurag Singh
(www.xda-developers.com)
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this post was submitted on 31 Jan 2026
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Dolphin (well, whatever the KDE's indexer is called) uses xattrs under the hood for tagging, so it will be compatible with other software (including {get,set}fattr).
The index has to be up-to-date, but then that would be true with any tag-based filesystem, it's just happening on a different layer (and arguably a layer which is more suitable for this - not sure it'd be a good idea to enforce synchronous indexing during xattr writes).
The most significant user-facing obstacle is lack of software which supports this system, but I guess that shows that there's not much desire for it in reality.
Right, i remembered KDE using xattr just after writing the answer. But still, only a KDE convention how the data is stored, not a fs convention.
But my point was, we could entirely get rid of file trees.
How many times did i wish,
findslowly traversing the fs tree, that you could define a bit more details than the name and roughly if it is a file, a directory or a symlink.Working on a small trashdir shell script currently, there is a .trashinfo file with the date deleted and the last used path; that's a hack, not a solution.
The fs index could contain things like mime type, intended use (library, executable, plaintext), advanced security context, deleted/visibility, without storing a tree the tooling has to hang on to. Finding stuff on the whole disk could be instantaneous.
And yeah, of course this would be incompatible to everything *nix and Windows currently. Which is why i think it would need to be a whole new OS (with compatibility tooling to *nix).
Current *nix kernels have a lot of Server-centric assumptions the distro tooling has to work around for desktop use anyway. The file systems also, they were made for server-centric use in times of MB, not TB. ext3/4 are just iterations over the old thing, with higher limits, better optimized algorithms, and so on.