D-Bus is a disgrace to the Linux desktop

Summary

D-Bus was introduced by GNOME folks about 20 years ago. For software made only 20 years ago, as opposed to 40 like X, it's surprisingly almost equally as bad. As a service, D-Bus is incredibly handy and useful, and overall, I believe the idea should absolutely be used by more apps. However, the implementation... oh boy. What is D-Bus? Everyone has heard about D-Bus, but what is it, actually? D-Bus' idea is pretty simple: let applications, services and other things expose methods or properties in a way that other apps can find them in one place, on the bus. Let's say we have a service that monitors the weather. Instead of each app knowing how to talk to each weather service, or even worse, implementing one itself, it can connect to the bus, and see if any service on the system exposes some weather API, then use it to get weather. Great, right? And yeah, the idea is wonderful. What went wrong? D-Bus is a lenient, unorganized and forgiving bus. Those three add to one of the biggest, fundamental, and conceptual blunders to any protocol, language or system. The most important blunders are: Objects on the bus can register whatever they want. Objects on the bus can call whatever they want, however they want, whenever they want. The protocol allows and even in a sense incentivises vendor-specific unchecked garbage. What this means in practice is the definition of "Garbage in, garbage out". D-Bus standards, part 1 Okay, apps need to communicate, right? Well, in some way right? Where do we find the way? Uhh... somewhere online, probably. Nobody actually knows because some of them are here, some there, many are unfinished, unreadable, or convoluted garbage docs, and no client follows them anyways. Let's take a look at some gems. These are actual docs Truly secure. I guess service implementors should learn telepathy. So is it a draft or widely used? D-Bus standards are a mess. And that's if we assume that implementors on both sides actually follow them (they often don't, as we ...