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Although flying well under the radar of the average Linux user, D-Bus has been an integral part of Linux distributions for nearly two decades and counting. Rather than using faster point-to-point interprocess communication via a Unix socket or such, an IPC bus allows for IP communication in a bus-like manner for convenience reasons. D-Bus replaced a few existing IPC buses in the Gnome and KDE desktop environments and became since that time the de-facto standard. Which isn’t to say that D-Bus is well-designed or devoid of flaws, hence attracting the ire of people like [Vaxry] who recently wrote an article on why D-Bus should die and proposes using hyprwire instead.
The broader context is provided by [Brodie Robertson], whose video adds interesting details, such as that Arch Linux wrote its own D-Bus implementation rather than use the reference one. Then there’s CVE-2018-19358 pertaining to the security risk of using an unlocked keyring on D-Bus, as any application on said bus can read the contents. The response by the Gnome developers responsible for D-Bus was very Wayland-like in that they dismissed the CVE as ‘works as designed’.
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Was this article written by AI? It’s full of errors. Local D-Bus traffic is not TCP/IP, and Arch didn’t write dbus-broker, they just set it as their default bus implementation same as Fedora.
I have found Hackaday to be depressingly full of shallow summaries of things said/done/written by other people elsewhere.
Maybe we do need a better dbus but its not going to be done by vaxry. We could probably use binder the android dbus.
Oh please, I hate D-Bus more than you could ever imagine. It’s one big fucking security risk luring users into being unable to understand whether their application is contained or not in a sandbox.
It’s very annoying also that you need some weird systemd command incantations to make it detectable by environment variables when using Wayland compositors or X11 window managers that aren’t full desktop environments, in combination with XDG portals.
I struggled so much getting dark mode running well with darkman. And screen sharing with Niri. Hhhrg.
Pretty sure the systemd command you’re talking about just adds the bus to PATH. You very likely could just do that yourself.
Whatever it does, it’s something that must be added manually in your compositor’s startup commands, or in your shell’s init file.
Yes, so it knows where the bus is. That seems… normal?
Would be neat if it wasn’t necessary to do that though, of course. 👍 I didn’t need to do that with i3 for some reason, e.g. Feels inconsistent.
Whatever i3 is using underneath, somebody put a line somewhere to tell everything where to find the bus.
If you’re not using a full desktop environment then you’re choosing to cover the features you’ve opted out of.
I respect that choice, and I’m glad our ecosystem allows it. But also I understand that you’re not going to get the full benefits of a desktop environment without the desktop environment.I mean, I agree completely. I chose i3 back in the day to get tiling windows, but also specifically to get my system as lean as possible to only run the things I needed. So I definitely made a conscious choice. As I did with Niri recently.
I just feel like it should be easier. Like you start the dbus daemon or whatever, and then that’s it. That should be it. There shouldn’t be anything left to do after that IMO. 😅
But I mean, I know how to search shit on the Internet, and read docs. I made it work. Others might struggle though, coming from Windows e.g. like I did decades ago. I have a big headstart.
