Post #1818270

2026-04-28 10:45 UTC

hot take: dbus is mostly just kinda okay and not some kind of terrible evil thing that must be eliminated sure it's a bit janky and the reference libdbus library to work with it is kinda ass (better ones exist now) but given when it was created it's not unusual and also it's not some kind of massive blocker that would warrant total replacement i'm fairly convinced that 95% of dbus hate mostly stems from the session bus formerly being launched with desktop, noone really understanding what dbus-launch and dbus-run-session really do, and the subsequent confusion about "why don't my bus-using apps work from another tty and/or from a clean terminal with fresh env vars" because abstract sockets are such a niche functionality and there used to be no real session tracking

Replies (4)

@valpackett@social.treehouse.systems 2026-04-28 10:55

@q66 who even says it must be eliminated? outside of reactionary unix conservatives whose opinions should be permanently redirected to /dev/null

Open ##1829860
@drakulix@social.dreampi.es 2026-04-28 10:59

@q66 100% agree and to extend upon that, I feel like this applies to a lot of the modern linux stack. Much of the frustration comes from power-users on single user systems, that are annoyed, that they "can't simply" do something *anymore*, while ignoring the complexities of modern computing, multi-user systems and security aspects. E.g. why can I not execute a graphical application as root under wayland, ignoring why that is a bad idea to begin with. Why is wayland not abstractable over network, ignoring the niceties of gpu-accelerated desktops and the existence of waypipe. Or take systemd. Dependency management is inherently complex and while it would surely be nice to be able to *simply* edit ones system initialization through a bunch of shell scripts, that completely ignores how difficult that is to maintain. Are any of these perfect solutions? Surely not and it is healthy that alternatives exist for the overall ecosystem. But "hate" for any of these is such a waste of time.

Open ##1829861
@navi@social.vlhl.dev 2026-04-28 11:43

@q66 my major problem is autostart, dbus autostart is not configurable, error prone, and on non-systemd, starts unsupervised daemons arbitrarily and specially with portals, having the thing autostart the kde portal when not in a kde session has caused a lot of confusion for wifey that took a while to debug dbus and pipewire were the major reasons i made openrc user-services after all

Open ##1829873
@Gottox@chaos.social 2026-04-28 11:48

@q66 I still would prefer to have ipc as a kernel feature with no user space service being involved.

Open ##1829879