Score:1

What is Zeitgeist Data Hub background process?

us flag

I am running Ubuntu MATE 22.10. I noticed the background process zeitgeist-datahub in htop. What is this process doing? Can I safely disable it?

I found a package of the same name. https://packages.ubuntu.com/kinetic/zeitgeist

This the output of apt rdepends zeitgeist.

$ apt rdepends zeitgeist
zeitgeist
Reverse Depends:
  Depends: activity-log-manager (>= 0.8~)
 |Recommends: synapse
  Depends: python3-zeitgeist
  Suggests: libzeitgeist-2.0-0
 |Recommends: libzeitgeist-1.0-1
Score:0
vn flag

From the Zeitgeist webpage:

Providing Desktop Activity Awareness

Zeitgeist is a service which logs the users’s activities and events, anywhere from files opened to websites visited and conversations.

It makes this information readily available for other applications to use.

It is able to establish relationships between items based on similarity and usage patterns.

You could see which other applications use this package (reverse dependencies):

apt rdepends zeitgeist

Since it's a service about usage tracking, it should be safe to disable.

Zeitgeist-datahub places the following link: /etc/xdg/autostart/zeitgeist-datahub.desktop. Move this file away from the autostart folder to disable it.

Also, you can disable the zeitgeist-core service:

sudo systemctl stop zeitgeist.service
sudo systemctl disable zeitgeist.service

And if you want to go all in:

sudo systemctl mask zeitgeist.service
us flag
How to disable it?
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