Chrome is literally the same shit as Chromium but with (more) spyware. Like, there are no other added features. And some people still choose to download Chrome. WHY!?!?!?
I wonder if chromium having the blue colors is what set the precedent for almost every other privacy-conscious browser to have a blue logo (Waterfox, GNU Icecat, palemoon, librewolf…)
EDIT on second though probably not, blue just seems like a good color for internet-related applications. Safari, edge, and internet explorer are also blue!
Does anybody know why dbus exists? I’ve been wracking my brain trying to come up with a usecase for dbus that isn’t already covered by Unix sockets....
Wouldn’t this also be possible with plain sockets tho? To continue with your example of music players, the current standard is MPRIS, which uses dbus. But in an alternate universe, the people behind MPRIS could just have decided that music players shall create sockets at /run/user/1000/mpris/[player name] that all speak the same standardized protocol. If a player wanted to add functionality beyond MPRIS, it could accept nonstandard requests on its socket, or create a new socket altogether for extended control.
I just don’t see how this would require any more coordination between developers than the current solution. And I don’t see how dbus can save you from having to “understanding every single […] app out there”. If anything, it adds the overhead of learning how dbus itself works, on top of how a specific app’s dbus interface works.
A message bus won’t magically remove the need for developers to sit down together and agree on how some API would work. And not having a message bus also doesn’t magically prevent you from allowing for alternative implementations. Pipewire is an alternative implementation of pulseaudio, and neither of those rely on dbus (pulse can optionally use dbus, but not for its core features). When using dbus, developers have to agree on which path the service owns and which methods it exposes. When using unix sockets, they have to agree where the socket lives and what data format it uses. It’s all the same.
It can even start the receiving daemon if it is not yet running.
We have a tool for that, it’s called an init system. Init systems offer a large degree of control over daemons (centralized logging? making sure things are started in the correct order? letting the user disable and enable different daemons?). Dbus’ autostart mechanism is a poor substitute. Want to run daemons per-user instead of as root? Many init systems let you do that too (I know systemd and runit do).
In either case you still need to read the documentation of whatever daemon you’re trying to interface with to understand how it actually works. Dbus just adds the extra overhead of also needing to understand how dbus itself works. Meanwhile sockets can be explained in sixteen words: “It’s like a TCP server, but listening on a path instead of an ip and port”.
There’s nothing about dbus that makes decoupling easier, you can do it just as well with sockets. Pipewire and pulse both speak the same protocol, and they both rely on sockets, not dbus. The vast majority of the apps on my system don’t know or care that they’re speaking with pipewire instead of pulse. Read my comment here lemmy.world/comment/6284859
Great point about policies! Setting permissions on sockets only gets you so far… I guess if you really wanted to, you could create an individual socket for every method of every resource, and have granular permissions that way. But that would be quite messy
By “start with dbus” do you mean with the dbus-launch utility? I think it’s needed because it sets some environment variables that thunar uses to actually find and connect to the bus. If you run just the daemon “on the side”, thunar won’t know how to connect to it. Kind of how you need $DISPLAY to be set correctly for X11 applications to work.
Linux users when (media1.tenor.com)
I guess it's the pretty colors? (lemmy.world)
What is the point of dbus? (lemmy.world)
Does anybody know why dbus exists? I’ve been wracking my brain trying to come up with a usecase for dbus that isn’t already covered by Unix sockets....