OA is using fairly capable hardware, so, out of curiosity, I installed the Kubuntu 15.04 alpha2 iso on my test laptop which is a 7 year old Thinkpad x61s dual core with 2.5Gb ram.
The result works responsively, with reasonably smooth graphical effects including the 'white out' and transparency effects mentioned in the OA.
Baloo search: baloosearch works from command line and from the application launcher. Finds both file names and words within files (.pdf,text). Dolphin does not return results. Fresh install gives 'invalid protocol' error within Dolphin. Installing baloo-utils gets rid of that error but still no results. There are older bug reports about this stuff.