Joel Roth via Dng said on Mon, 15 Dec 2025 14:15:06 -1000

>I remember downloading the source. It is millions of lines!
>(At least somewhere on that side of the LOC spectrum.)
>
>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46278857
>
>I think I've heard of alternatives. Maybe there are valid
>criticisms of the criticism in the article.
>
>It is on my system, and some apps use it, but I'm in the
>small window manager party, not the big DE party (and there
>is no small DE.) Not a fan, but easier to let it
>exist on my system for a few small conveniences it
>provides.
>
>News flash! Deep pocketed influencers are getting huge
>chunks of inscutable code onto many linux machines.
>
>Well, that's my snark for today. May your software follow
>*your* intentions in the New Year and for eternity.

Yeah, I think most of those on THIS list boss our computers rather than
let our computers boss us.

Dbus is a hideous monster. I use it for Pulseaudio, which I had to
install to get my Python built playlist handler to work correctly.
Other than that, I use it as little as possible. My Openbox window
manager throws a "can't use dbus" or some such error on opening, so I
just click it closed and go on upon my business.

In theory a clearinghouse where any two random apps can communicate
sounds like a great idea, but in practice it's a horror movie. In the
past Kmail caused dbus-daemon to gobble up all CPU. Try the following
command, and note all the Unix Domain Sockets dbus gobbles up:

lsof +c 15 -U | grep -i dbus

You can pipe the output of the preceding command to wc -l to see
how many Unix Domain Sockets Dbus is using. When I just did it it
was 64. Those Unix Domain Sockets are important: If you run out, you
can't launch new programs.

Like I said, I can understand how someone using an integrated Desktop
Environment would find a message bus useful, but Dbus is an
hypercomplexificated mess.

SteveT

Steve Litt

http://444domains.com