I recently removed dbus from my system (along with consolekit and polkit). I didn't notice any change (I was running it as system daemon and per-user from .xinitrc). However, many people claim that one just need dbus, most of linux applications are using it etc etc. My question is, why do I need it? I don't think I understand what does it exactly do. I know that is a "message bus system", that processes communicate through it etc. And? I still don't know what do I gain from using it. Could someone explain it to me, preferably with examples "from real life"?
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As an end-user, you don't. There is nothing that D-Bus does that couldn't be done a different way.
The benefits of D-Bus are primarily of interest to developers. It unifies several tricky bits of functionality (object-oriented and type-safe messaging, daemon activation, event notification, transport independence) under a single facility that works the same regardless of what programming language or windowing toolkit is in use.
Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams
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2But shouldnt then some application not bei able to run if dbus is not present? – lalala Apr 28 '17 at 13:28
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Some, sure. But it is possible to make it an optional requirement regardless. – Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams Apr 28 '17 at 14:44
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System tray notifications on DEs are created by sending DBUS messages. At least I had one setup that used DBUS on awesome for that reason. – Spidey Feb 18 '18 at 18:28
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1@Spidey: Yes, but there's no reason that they couldn't use domain sockets for that. It just so happens that D-Bus is a better choice. – Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams Feb 18 '18 at 18:29
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Of course, DBUS is just another IPC protocol. But this is one of the examples that the OP asked for in the first place. – Spidey Feb 18 '18 at 18:31