Disable “tracker” in Fedora

Update- Disabling tracker also disables Samba. This is needed by my Xerox Versalink C405 printer for scanning documents directly from the printer to my Linux machine.

A note on the Versalink C405. I have owned a number of printers, mostly HP, and this Xerox printer outperforms every other printer that I have ever owned. I would never buy HP again.

Tracker is a background Linux task that catalogues your disk. It can be a disk hog. To disable it, do the following.

  1. Copy the autostart file and override it with a user-specific one: $ cp /etc/xdg/autostart/tracker-store.desktop ~/.config/autostart/tracker-store.desktop
    and append to it:
    Hidden=true
    (The same step also applies for tracker’s friends, such as tracker-miner-fs, etc.)
  2. Mask (which is the strongest yet nondestructive way to “disable” a static systemd service completely [4]) all tracker-related services:
        $ systemctl --user mask tracker-store

Thanks to https://www.soimort.org/notes/171103/ for this information.