Maybe? It’ll almost certainly be worse (or not work at all maybe) than on Windows.

Oh that’s pretty cool! I does seem like a shame to not have something like that on Linux.

Seems like a good and useful workflow for sure. Don’t know if something equivalent exists, maybe it doesn’t.

I’d personally use find for this, but it is a command line tool, and while I have memorized some of the more common options (directories-only would be -type d for example), I’d have to look at the manpage for more advances options. It’s not hard exactly but it’s not easy-to-use GUI software for sure.

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.

locate uses an index you need to update using updatedb before it is able to find anything.

updatedb may run periodically because of a cron job, but the index is probably missing right after installing it manually.