Problems with D-Bus on the Linux desktop

https://blog.vaxry.net/articles/2025-dbusSucks

by LorenDB • 7 months ago

336 308 7 months ago

blog.vaxry.net

ginko• 7 months ago

I was bracing for the proposed replacement being integrated in systemd.

riskable• 7 months ago

systemd-busdd (pronounced, "busted")

112233• 7 months ago

which of them? :)

I was actually looking forward to bus1, such a nice design.

Instead, we are getting varlink it seems. yuk. "json json eggs bacon and json"

shevy-java4• 7 months ago

It may soon happen. :)

systemd-bus 2.0

cyberax• 7 months ago

It already has one: Varlink ( https://varlink.org/ ). For pretty much the reasons outlined by the topic starter.

Narishma• 7 months ago

Written in Rust with an MIT license for good measure.

0x4575• 7 months ago

You mean this? https://rust-for-linux.com/android-binder-driver

0x4575• 7 months ago

I wouldn't hate it. I used to hate systemd, but today it's one of my favorite linux things.

jasonjayr• 7 months ago

Could this bus offer a dbus-compatibility 'firewall/translator' d-bus socket per each app (provided they use the d-bus environment variables correctly)? That might speed adoption if it is able to be a drop-in default, instead of needing to run 2 busses.

charcircuit5• 7 months ago

I've decided to take matters into my own hands. I am writing a new bus.

Why not reuse Binder which has been to deployed to billions of devices, being a core part of a serious OS, with many many more developers who understand it compared to dbus.

You would probably want to write your own service manager, but you can reuse hardened stuff that already exist.

zb3• 7 months ago

Binder will come to linux desktop soon... together with Android :)

anon-3988• 7 months ago

Is there any plans by some DE to replace D-bus with Binder?

bee_rider• 7 months ago

Which OS? I didn’t get many results for BSD binder. Then I figured maybe you were joking about the “serious” part, so I tried windows binder, iOS binder, didn’t see much…

schmichael• 7 months ago

https://source.android.com/docs/core/architecture/ipc/binder...

charcircuit5• 7 months ago

Binder is the primary way apps talk to the various OS services on Android.

https://source.android.com/docs/core/architecture/ipc/binder...

https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/admin-guide/binderfs....

AshamedCaptain13• 7 months ago

There are few implementations of the Binder userspace outside of Android.

pseudalopex3• 7 months ago

How many implementations existed of their new bus?

aryonoco• 7 months ago

Not widely known but the original Binder, OpenBinder, was not even for Linux or Android It was developed for BeOS.

OpenBinder was one of the few pieces of code which was open sourced in Be Inc’s dying days just before it was acquired by Palm.

Many of the principal Be developers who worked on OpenBinder, Dianne Hackborn, Jean-Baptiste Queru, et al then moved from Palm to Danger, which was developing Android and which was later acquired by Google.

And the rest, as they say, is history.

jabl2• 7 months ago

Yes! Make something built on top of binder, and use something with orders of magnitude more users and developer resources behind it..

hardened stuff that already exist.

To make it even more hardened(?), Google recently contributed and got merged a Rust implementation of binder for the Linux kernel (and they're apparently planning to eventually remove the old C implementation).

https://lwn.net/Articles/953116/

https://lore.kernel.org/rust-for-linux/20231101-rust-binder-...

rendaw2• 7 months ago

Is Binder better than D-Bus? How so?

charcircuit5• 7 months ago

1. Better devex. The toolchain for binder properly checks that you are writing and reading transactions correctly and if you don't you get a compile time error. Meanwhile using dbus you can call things wrong and it will still compile.

2. Better latency. When you send a Binder transaction to another process Linux will immediately schedule the binder thread of the other process, unless it's a oneway transaction that does not block executon. Then once the other process replies, the original process is immediately rescheduled. Dbus does not affect Linux's scheduling of processes. When you send a dbus message any other process can be scheduled and run instead of the bus. And then anything can run in-between the bus sending the message to the target process.

3. Having the message go through the bus also results in extra copying. Not just cheap copying of memory. Since it's through a UNIX socket it has to use extra system calls to read out of and into another socket. As opposed to binder where it's able to simply copy the memory of the parcel from one process to another.

uep• 7 months ago

My knowledge is outdated, as I last seriously looked at it about nine years ago, but I doubt Binder is even better than dbus; it was not good. I'm quite surprised with people suggesting it. There was that recent kernel Binder bug even with the rust implementation. It was rewritten in rust because it has had a never-ending string of serious security bugs. On top of that, it had very poor throughput. I'm guessing this improved with the rust implementation.

It was a toy created by former OS devs who really didn't want to use Linux, but wanted their pet IPC from their former OS. It even used to be the case that Binder would dynamically create threads in the receiving process without userspace knowing. As in, your process would magically have function calls coming in from threads that you never created. Imagine the issues this can create with locking, forking, etc. This ended up being changed to get it upstreamed, but I consider this absolutely insane behavior.

_flux• 7 months ago

From the style of this article I expected that https://github.com/hyprwm/hyprwire and https://github.com/hyprwm/hyprtavern would have documentation, specification and perhaps a bunch of tests, but they're not really there (other than smoke tests).

Those would have been a great starting point as well! But maybe we'll see them later.

wpm5• 7 months ago

I believe the sole author is doing finals for their last year of university at the moment.

Oxodao• 7 months ago

tbf they stated in their article that those are not there YET multiple time. We'll wait and see once they're done

publicdebates• 7 months ago

I wonder if the design of D-Bus has anything to do with a principle I notice a lot, where the most meritorious solution never rises to the top for any given problem, but rather one apparently chosen by absolute randomness. For example, I wonder how many repos on github have legitimately created a 100% better framework than React, but the author simply can't get the word out for whatever reason, so the project remains accidentally anonymous. Maybe D-Bus has something similar?

Y_Y• 7 months ago

Worse is better, but meta, because the worst way of choosing is what wins

bigfatkitten2• 7 months ago

D-Bus came to prominence because of its association with GNOME, which has in turn has remained relevant mostly because of its association with Red Hat.

Conan_Kudo3• 7 months ago

No, it remained relevant because Ubuntu based every stack for their desktop on GNOME technologies (except the aborted Unity 8).

volf_• 7 months ago

The world is filled with "good enough" solutions. If it has 80% of the functionally needed, it will be good enough for most use cases.

the most meritorious solution never rises to the top

You know why? Because it was the best solution at the time that covered everything they needed. You can only complain about it because the initial problem was solved and people were able to move on to something else.

Does it work for what we need it to do? Yes? Ok. Now that we have settled this problem, we can continue on developing.

Meritocracy is only relevant to someone who has ideas but no desire or ability to actually structure the idea in such a way that would work in the world we find ourselves in today.

Maybe D-Bus has something similar?

So you just commented here to say nothing but "dbus sucks because it isn't the best. I wonder if there are better options?".

bawolff• 7 months ago

the most meritorious solution never rises to the top for any given problem, but rather one apparently chosen by absolute randomness.

Respectfully, i think that mostly happens when people reviewing the solution space don't understand the problem fully. Often the requirements differ from what people think they are, and as a result the winner seems random because they don't understand the actual requirements.

jiggawatts• 7 months ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better

supportengineer2• 7 months ago

There is definitely an elite cabal with its thumb on the scale here.

baobun• 7 months ago

And the prevalance of D-Bus is part of it...? Spill the beans!

sph• 7 months ago

The deep state forcing everybody to use GNOME smh my head

abenga• 7 months ago

Most of the time, there is usually no "most meritorious", just something that is elsewhere on the "trade-off space" than the person speaking would like. I usually dismiss everybody who so snidely and arrogantly dismisses results of other people's work(e.g. the OP article), like there was some _obviously_ correct solution that the people who worked on the widely accepted solution were too stupid or malicious to choose. They could not possibly have had other priorities or doing their best to get something working acceptably in a complex ecosystem with no central control, no! They are just dumber than you (or just plain malicious).

tguvot2• 7 months ago

iirc it was developed as freedesktop project in order to create standard desktop bus to be used by everybody, as back in a day kde had it's own bus and gnome had another one.

twic• 7 months ago

Part of what's going on is that all of this stuff is developed by volunteers. If only one person, or three people or whatever, are actually willing to give up hundreds of thousands of hours of their own time to work on something, then those people get to make the decisions about what gets done. There's very little supervision from any kind of "upper management" to catch bad decisions.

On top of that, there's adverse selection here. Who gives up thousands of hours to work on some obscure corner of the Linux desktop? People with quite unusual thought processes.

sam_lowry_• 7 months ago

D-Bus has the weight of Redhat behind it.

It's just politics, really.

AshamedCaptain13• 7 months ago

Can't you guys stop reinventing the wheel every other day? I hate D-Bus like everyone else, even though at least it did bring project Utopia and all such crap. But even if I think it sucks I stay with it for the simple reason that the more alternatives you create the more you annoy other users WAY MORE than any benefit you bring them. D-Bus has been used everywhere from LG TVs to automotives, so at least it f*cking works.

Does it miss a spec? Write one.

Do you really want your secretsd or whatever to only be able to reply to whomever stored the secret? Make clients store a cookie or something and only reply if they prove ownership of it. But I have to ask : what the hell is your threat model here? The attacker is just going to ptrace firefox and read all the secrets anyway. Or read its files in $XDG_CONFIG_DIR. You are just moving around who has the ultimate responsibility, and that looks like security theater. In addition, I _want_ other programs to be able to read secrets (e.g. keyring administrators, .netrc-style shared secrets, etc.)

Do you hate a{sv}? If you propose JSON as alternative, you are going to make me laugh.

Etc. Etc.

shevy-java4• 7 months ago

How does it work exactly? I mean, the premise here is:

"it f*cking works"

Can we objectify this claim made here?

antiloper2• 7 months ago

Make clients store a cookie or something and only reply if they prove ownership of it

Unix domain socket authentication is stronger and doesn't require storing cookies on the client side.

what the hell is your threat model here? The attacker is just going to ptrace firefox and read all the secrets anyway.

Which is why you can (and people do, e.g. flatpak) run applications where ptrace or global filesystem access is blocked. Which is why portals exist and why there shouldn't be a "get all secrets via dbus" escape hatch.

I _want_ other programs to be able to read secrets (e.g. keyring administrators, .netrc-style shared secrets, etc.)

Then don't use it? Secure defaults matter for most users.

Do you hate a{sv}? If you propose JSON as alternative, you are going to make me laugh.

Find the *kwargs here: https://wayland.app/protocols/xdg-shell

Etc. etc. This isn't the 90s anymore.

AshamedCaptain13• 7 months ago

Unix domain socket authentication is stronger and doesn't require storing cookies on the client side.

And pointless here, since everything runs under the same uid. You need to authenticate this is the same browser that stored this secret, not that this is the same uid (useless), or the same pid, or any other concept that unix domain socket authentication understands.

Which is why you can (and people do, e.g. flatpak) run applications where ptrace or global filesystem access is blocked. Which is why portals exist and why there shouldn't be a "get all secrets via dbus" escape hatch.

In which case they do not connect to the same D-Bus "bus", and the problem is again non-existent. See how flatpak sandoxing does it.

Then don't use it? Secure defaults matter for most users.

Right until they notice they can no longer view the keyring contents, or any other stupid limitation most desktop users couldn't care about.

In fact, if you do not need a shared secrets service, and your applications are containerized... why do you need a secrets IPC at all? Just let each program store its secrets in some of its supposedly private storage...

Find the *kwargs here: https://wayland.app/protocols/xdg-shell

Much better to have a million non-extendable protocols competing with each other. To this day there are two protocols (at least) for exposing the address of the DbusMenu service of a surface, one for gnome-shell and one for kwin. So much for the uglyness of X atoms. And this has nothing really to do with the design of the IPC mechanism itself...

crest• 7 months ago

The funny/sad detail is that the 80s (at the latest) already solved the problem. Have a look as XDR and Sun RPC. It has both strongly typed APIs and versioning built in. You would have to come up with your authentication mechanism for applications e.g. have them send a cookie file (descriptor).

senko3• 7 months ago

Do you hate a{sv}? If you propose JSON as alternative,

Obviously, the components should talk using MCP.

skissane• 7 months ago

You may be joking but I think seriously that may be a decent idea. The universal RPC/automation mechanism which everybody implements-whatever its warts may be-is superior to a better-designed one which few actually end up supporting. You don’t need an LLM to call MCP tools, there’s nothing stopping you from calling MCP tools from any programming language.

blablabla123• 7 months ago

This is the first time I hear that anyone hates D-Bus. I always saw it as a global API Bus that Apps can register to and which enables some sort of interoperability and automation. After all it can even be used from Bash. What is bad about this?

The security aspect seems also a bit funny to me. After all the average Desktop has most data in the home directory, so every application can read everything. That's not the fault of D-Bus.

Also I'm puzzled that Polkit hasn't been mentioned even once.

vanviegen• 7 months ago

The security aspect seems also a bit funny to me. After all the average Desktop has most data in the home directory, so every application can read everything.

The world is moving towards sandboxed applications (through flatpak and friends) more and more. As per the OP, this is one of the things holding sandboxing back.

throw_await2• 7 months ago

The architecture is fundamentally broken when you are using multiple window managers / desktop environments https://github.com/dunst-project/dunst/issues/363

dolmen2• 7 months ago

Check varlink, an alternative to D-Bus defined in the SystemD world.

https://media.ccc.de/v/all-systems-go-2024-276-varlink-now-

craftkiller• 7 months ago

The security aspect seems also a bit funny to me. After all the average Desktop has most data in the home directory, so every application can read everything. That's not the fault of D-Bus.

Those secret stores (gnome-keyring/kwallet) store the secrets encrypted on disk, so every application can read the encrypted secrets but only the secret store has the encryption key to decrypt them. This is held in memory, not on disk.

mx7zysuj4xew3• 7 months ago

The reason you do t hear much about it is because it's not an often discussed topic. Nonetheless the hate is there.

Dbus is a godawful mess. Imagine the windows registry, except it can only be inspected at runtime, contains executable binaries and is exceptionally fragile

torginus2• 7 months ago

I am puzzled by this comment - hasn't been an explicit goal for the Linux desktop (pushed esp by the Gnome/Fedora folks) to have applications run in a sandbox? That's literally what stuff like Flatpak xdg-desktop-portal and Wayland isolation are built around.

And maybe its time for a reinvention anyway? IPC and efficient and portable formats are very mature nowadays, with protobuf, flatbuffers etc. and the general model of the internet is based around service location, and stuff talking to each other.

I'm kida curious why they didn't go with Unix Sockets in the first place, with named pipes in memory carrying the message transport.

seba_dos15• 7 months ago

hasn't been an explicit goal for the Linux desktop (pushed esp by the Gnome/Fedora folks) to have applications run in a sandbox?

Yes, and the article's author forgot to tell you that their rant doesn't apply to applications running in a sandbox, as their D-Bus access is filtered.

smaudet• 7 months ago

I've never had much luck with it either. A lot of the same pain points as the author.

As for it being used everywhere, sure, we had some bad SOAP stuff being used everywhere at one time, but that's not a good thing...

Regarding secrets etc.. on the one hand, yeah it's not much to worry about people with access to your machine reading stuff on your machine, buut*, it's kinda dumb to have stuff encrypted and left around for a public unsecured protocol. The solution would be, for apps that need security, don't use dbus.

If the API was less loosey goosey (self documentating, not so open ended, less awkward), I agree it's fine for applications at the same level of trust to all access the same thing.

The problem is more random scripts off the internet using browser apis to read stuff out of local storage containers. Forcing local containers to explicitly allow such access, and yes, using a non-dbus protocol, would be a preferred method, while not requiring overly complex authentication schemes locally...

Otherwise the main change I would have made would be to explicitly allow applications to access the bus, vs just a random app having access by virtue of running in memory...

agumonkey• 7 months ago

I may be naive, but why not adopt the browsers api development model. 90% shared core apis, experimental ones, for a few years it seems that every group can work on its code without breaking things for user much while new ideas coming regularly.

themafia• 7 months ago

d-bus often fails to work properly, at least on my machine, where systemd is not in use.

it already annoys me.

an alternative would be welcome.

Lammy• 7 months ago

Does it miss a spec? Write one.

FreeDesktop-dot-Org would not accept one from the author if he did:

https://blog.vaxry.net/articles/2024-fdo-and-redhat

https://blog.vaxry.net/articles/2024-fdo-and-redhat2

Hizonner• 7 months ago

I don't recall asking for any "bus" in the first place.

javier23• 7 months ago

Perhaps the SecretManager deserves some extra attention, but I concur. We worked long enough on this, please dont split whats left of the linux desktop...

wolvesechoes2• 7 months ago

Can't you guys stop reinventing the wheel every other day?

No, Linux desktop is just an opportunity for a bunch of special snowflakes to enact their "vision", force their niche requirements on other 99.999% of users or create fiefdoms, where they can feel good and safe.

Arch-TK• 7 months ago

Putting aside the post and whether it's correct or not.

Reinvent what wheel exactly?

D-Bus can't read your mind (yet) and as such it can't generate an API for you, you still need to design a protocol, it's just that it's on top of D-Bus with certain quirks and restrictions.

Doing the same over UDS in 2025 isn't any more work and doesn't have any negative impact on end users. There's nothing unique about D-Bus from a usability standpoint that can't be done with a service listening over UDS.

This is equivalent to saying that you're reinventing the wheel by not using HTTP as a transport.

Do you hate a{sv}? If you propose JSON as alternative, you are going to make me laugh.

Maybe you should look at Varlink. The systemd backed D-Bus alternative. It uses JSON.

Regarding secrets management:

My password manager's protocol is handled using exec and command line arguments. Arbitrary applications can ask for passwords, but they won't get them. They won't read them from disk.

The design of the gnome keyring isn't great, but I actually don't think the protocol matters much in this case.

amelius3• 7 months ago

D-bus breaks a very basic expectation.

That when you can open a basic X11 application like xeyes or xterm, you can open any X11 application.

D-bus breaks this.

And it makes my Linux system feel like yet another case of "microservice failure".

csdreamer7• 7 months ago

That when you can open a basic X11 application like xeyes or xterm, you can open any X11 application.

I have never heard of that. Even if it was true (and sounds like another security issue); X11 is almost gone for most people. Why should anyone care?

shevy-java4• 7 months ago

It is not true that X11 is gone. I use it. Many other people use it too.

Can you show where you got the impression that "X11 is gone"?

pmontra2• 7 months ago

It is almost gone for me too, except that I can't adjust brightness on my laptop with Wayland. I can with X11. It's a long story but that's the TL;DR of it. So until all of that almost goes away, it's full X11 at least for some people like me.

ambicapter• 7 months ago

I'm not sure why you would need to have "heard of that". If I was getting Linux to work on my computer as many people have, and got xeyes or xterm to work, I would expect other X11 apps to work as well.

mx7zysuj4xew3• 7 months ago

Listen in most discussions bringing up security is a good way for you to shut the conversation down, but in the case of IPC anyone who cares enough will be knowledgeable enough to see it for the red herring it is

viraptor3• 7 months ago

Are you really thinking of dbus here? It's not in the normal binary loading path. And afterwards, it's not any different from other libraries which may or may not stop the app from functioning for many reasons.

shevy-java4• 7 months ago

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.

That's not a surprise. The author of systemd, for instance, is working for Microsoft. Suddenly all those changes to the Linux ecosystem make a lot of sense. It became a corporate commodity, from A to Z. And when that is your objective, it kind of makes sense to have a unified system, even if it is crap.

awesome_dude2• 7 months ago

Wherever they might be working now.. isn't really relevant to the project

Lennart Poettering and Kay Sievers, the software engineers then working for Red Hat who initially developed systemd,[2] started a project to replace Linux's conventional System V init in 2010.[16]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemd#History

the_why_of_y2• 7 months ago

Lennart Poettering and Kay Sievers, the software engineers then working for Red Hat who initially developed systemd

This is wrong, Kay Sievers was working for Novell/SuSE at that time, see https://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html#faqs

bflesch3• 7 months ago

I'm vocal critic of microsoft but systemd/wayland was one of the best things to happen to linux. If you can improve upon it, then feel free to implement a better solution.

ptx2• 7 months ago

A solution to what? Aside from details of the implementation, one can also disagree with the framing of the problem and scope of the solution. Sure, we're free to implement an alternative solution for doing DNS resolution and IPC and logging and time synchronization and job scheduling and service monitoring and ... but should there be a single solution to all of these things at once?

debo_• 7 months ago

This is so close to a jwz post that if the stylesheet mimicked his website's, I'd believe it was him.

Terr_4• 7 months ago

Ever seen kwallet or gnome-keyring? Yeah, these things. These are supposed to be "secret storage" for things like signing keys, passwords, etc. They can be protected by a password, which means they are secure... right? [...] any app on the bus can read all secrets in the store if the store is unlocked.

Well, TIL. Looks like the default GUI for that is `seahorse`, so let's see what I've got on a relatively fresh installation... Looks like mostly Chromium stuff where there's a key that unlocks something more application-specific (e.g. for Discord) and an access token for my JetBrains account.

So no plaintext passwords per se, but now I wonder what a malicious app might uncover if it pursued the local Chromium stuff.

XorNot4• 7 months ago

Where do you think those secrets are going to be stored otherwise and how are you planning to authenticate to them?

If you're not entering a password at some point, then they're in memory and available to all anyway. If no system prompts or notifies you access is happening, then it's irrelevant what software machinations might be governing this.

jeroenhd3• 7 months ago

On platforms like Android, iOS, and macOS, secrets are easily stored encrypted with no access to the key unless you exploit the kernel. On Windows, a similar feature is opt-in, but compatibility makes it a little less reliable.

iOS and macOS combine sandboxing with their Secure Element. Android uses TEE or a secure element-like piece of hardware. Windows uses a hypervisor + the (f)TPM.

Nothing Linux can't do, it's basically glueing together a small early boot KVM VM + TPM + secure boot together with an API. Setting up your own secure boot keys to make it run relatively seamless is a pain on many consumer devices, though.

Terr_4• 7 months ago

When Important Banking App stores a secret to my "keyring", I would never have expected that the "secret" would be trivially available to all other programs that run.

Imagine if it worked that way for browsers, and every website with a saved-password got to see all the other saved passwords...

pseudalopex3• 7 months ago

If you're not entering a password at some point, then they're in memory and available to all anyway.

They entered a password to log in probably. And Linux had a setting to restrict ptrace since years.

senko3• 7 months ago

A gold standard behaviour for when you want to replace a disfunctional tool/system and will require buy-in from a wide community, is to behave like Charlie Marsh did with ruff and uv.

He didn't barge in guns blazing proclaiming "pip is a disgrace" and "it's a fuckin joke". He wrote a tool that was much better and encourage others to try it. Within a year or so, it snowballed into an unstoppable change.

This project currently has a bunch of C++ files, no docs, no tests, no roadmap on how it might replace d-bus, nothing. And as another commenter pointed out, starting a new system service in 2025, yelling about security, and doing this in an unsafe language doesn't inspire confidence.

Lennart Poettering, Theo de Raadt and Linus Torvalds may get away with talking like this, but if you seriosly want to bring a wide community on board (without which the entire thing is a non-starter), look to Charlie instead.

Oh, and also, if you think D-Bus is bad, consider yourself lucky you didn't need to use the thing it replaced - CORBA.

GalaxyNova4• 7 months ago

This project currently has a bunch of C++ files, no docs, no tests

I think the more important thing is the protocol itself, rather than the specific implementation. As the author notes the current D-bus standards are substandard at best.

senko3• 7 months ago

I can get on board with that if there's a protocol spec - at least a draft or something more tangible than "it's a tavern".

I just see a bunch of undocumented C++ code here.

forty• 7 months ago

I think one of the point from your parent comment is that something that works for people is a powerful way of making things happen, much more powerful than rants or theory or protocols. I also noticed that with cryptography algorithms/protocol for example: design the most amazing algorithm - no one is going to use it ever if there is no great reference implementation people can use.

Asooka3• 7 months ago

Similarly I wish open-source devs who wish to extend and improve existing tech take a page out of Microsoft and do their Embrace, Extend, Extinguish tactic. Like: "Here is my new D-Bus implementation, it has a couple of extra bells and whistles, which I need for my project, and is faster. Oh I have added more security, you don't have to use it right now, but some services will require it. ... Security is now mandatory. ... The protocol is now called Wire and if you need D-Bus, you can run this legacy translation layer. ... The legacy translation layer is no longer installed by default, but will be maintained for those who need it. ... It has been 30 years since anybody has needed D-Bus, we are no longer maintaining the translation layer."

Which is kind of what OP is doing, but less directly inflammatory. I wish him all the luck regardless.

javier23• 7 months ago

Aint that the truth. D-Bus isnt that terribly shit either, we just need to solve this SecretManager issue...

p_l8• 7 months ago

At this point I would like CORBA back.

parsimoniousplb• 7 months ago

That would be Cap'n Proto RPC

tosti• 7 months ago

Yes! And always put the network first. Some kind of "network object model environment" is needed where servives can be somewhere on your network.

It just needs a catchy name.

TuringNYC• 7 months ago

For a second, I thought this was about Deutche Bank's central markets messaging bus, also called D-Bus. So many memories...

antiloper2• 7 months ago

Raises the obvious question of why not using the wayland protocol (on another socket, not on the compositor socket). It has mature implementations in many languages, an IDL with compilers, and every GUI application is already going to link to libwayland anyway.

(Or perhaps even COM)

bayindirh• 7 months ago

vaxry has a beef with Drew Devault, who called him out and exposed his behavior when not writing code.

Considering a sizeable part of Wayland's low-level stuff is written by Drew back in the day, vaxry won't touch anything written by Drew.

This "protocol" effort is to further decouple Hyprland from Wayland infrastructure.

Like everything, this effort is again driven by ego and spite.

grimblee• 7 months ago

Now that's the info I missed, I knew the hyperland devs have a bad reputation so I was wondering what was not being said , thank you good sir.

wolvesechoes2• 7 months ago

Peak FOSS experience

bflesch3• 7 months ago

The problem with dbus is also that all these nice browser extensions that integrate websites with gnome/kde talk over dbus. These dbus APIs had several DOS vulnerabilities, some of which could be triggered by visiting any website. It is unacceptable that my desktop environment crashes just because something floods the dbus API, even moreso if it can be triggered by visiting a website.

So if you are a security researcher, dbus is a very worthwhile entry point if you want to improve some open source software :-)

anthk3• 7 months ago

Not an issue with a standalone VM :D

dijit4• 7 months ago

Now you have two problems.

psanford2• 7 months ago

What browser extensions? Why would I want websites to integrate with gnome or kde? What does that even mean?

airhangerf15• 7 months ago

I'm guessing the poster meant the USB and Bluetooth browser protocols (which I still find insane how anyone thought those were a good idea, but it's literally the only way to configure some keyboards today).

stefanfisk• 7 months ago

Isn’t this bad boy installed by default in most Gnome distros? https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/gnome-shell-integra...

GalaxyNova4• 7 months ago

any app on the bus can read all secrets in the store if the store is unlocked

Holy shit. I knew conceptually that this was the case but never really took the time to consider the implications.

Pretty much whenever you unlock your keyring all your secrets are accessible by any software that can connect to the bus... How is this acceptable? Are we just supposed to run everything as Flatpak?

throw_await2• 7 months ago

keepassxc asks before giving out secrets

XorNot4• 7 months ago

Most people disable that.

The reality is no one wants to be prompted everytime for a password. They want it to auto fill.

In complaining about this people are setting the boundary at the wrong place, and in proposing solutions assuming user behavior which doesn't exist (they will absolutely click "yes trust random application I'm busy move along now please").

I do not want to be prompted. I do perhaps want grades of secret access but even then thats asking a lot - do you want my SSH keys? Well yeah I probably want to give them to you some app which is automating things over SSH. It's 5 more versions before you get updates to ship them all to Russia or wherever after an author hand over.

jeroenhd3• 7 months ago

Funnily enough, my work macOS keychain maimed itself in such a way that I need to recreate it every time I install an OS update. Every time I recreate it, the OS spends a few minutes in a state where every application that needs access to the secrets store requests access through the keychain's password. Incredibly secure!

Turns out, that's every application, every few minutes, many of them multiple times. Applications like having access to things like refresh tokens so they can download your email, or discover passwords for offering autofill for a website.

I'd welcome many improvements to the Linux status quo, but applications not needing to ask before accessing the bus is the only reason it's usable in the first place.

mx7zysuj4xew3• 7 months ago

It's acceptable because flatpak dbus and all its ilk are too opaque for the average "experienced" user to fully grok. The problems are there, but the situation is so convoluted that it's hard to build a mental model unless you truly understand the overall system architecture

supportengineer2• 7 months ago

"Everyone has heard about D-Bus"

I have never heard of D-Bus until today.

pjmlp6• 7 months ago

D-Bus is the closest Linux desktop has from XPC, COM, Android IPC.

Maybe it should be treated better, not rebooting it every couple of times.

The problem is naturally the Linux desktop fragmentation that hinders a proper full stack approach to application development.

What works for GNOME is useless for KDE, and what works for KDE is useless for XFCE, which is ignored by Sway and so forth.

GalaxyNova4• 7 months ago

The fragmentation is a natural consequence of different use cases existing.

You can't have your cake and eat it too.

pjmlp6• 7 months ago

Which is why in the end, WSL 2.0 is the Year of Desktop Linux, while Android, WebOS and ChromeOS commonality is the Linux kernel, not userspace.

tguvot2• 7 months ago

actually kde has kparts which are somewhat like com. prior to d-bus kde used to use dcop.

c-hendricks• 7 months ago

God I loved kparts, but wasn't that more the idea that everything should be embeddable?

KPart technology is used in kde to reuse GUI components ... By using kparts in applications developers can spend less time implementing text editor or command line features, for example and just use a katepart or a konsolepart instead.

https://techbase.kde.org/Development/Tutorials/Using_KParts

pjmlp6• 7 months ago

It does, but again only usable by KDE apps.

jabl2• 7 months ago

What works for GNOME is useless for KDE, and what works for KDE is useless for XFCE, which is ignored by Sway and so forth.

KDE had their own IPC thingy, DCOP, but it has been replaced with D-Bus.

pjmlp6• 7 months ago

Yep, using Linux in various forms since 1995.

bjourne• 7 months ago

D-Bus is over 20 years old so a reboot is in order. All this guy's gripes are not legitimate, but many are. However, upgrading desktop infrastructure is just as much about influence (clout) and "social" excellence as it is about technical exellence. A new ipc mechanism that is not backed by the major players has no chance.

continue-100• 7 months ago

I'd argue vaxry _is_ a major player, what with the rise of omarchy.org and r/unixporn, popularizing hyprland enough for him to have enough momentum to publish standards for this new era of TWM linux desktop.

dismalaf• 7 months ago

Honestly, who cares?

This will no doubt be used by many people who use Hyprland and I really don't think Vaxry cares about anything else. He's a college kid from Poland who now is getting enough donations he probably will never have to work for someone else if he doesn't want to, and can just continue developing his own ecosystem.

viraptor3• 7 months ago

This means that when "/usr/bin/firefox" sets a "passwords:superwebsite.com = animebooba", an app called "~/Downloads/totally_legit.sh" can not see ...

It will be interesting to see how it treats symlinks in this case. Or specifically, will this idea break completely for nixos or not.

GalaxyNova4• 7 months ago

My guess is it will keep track of the PID

viraptor3• 7 months ago

PID changes with every execution. How would it help when preserving configuration data?

tmtvl3• 7 months ago

Do you mean the real path instead of the PID?

wpm5• 7 months ago

Keychain ACLs on macOS use the codesigning requirement of the executable requesting the secret.

anthk3• 7 months ago

DBUS -> Crappy COM

SystemD -> SVCHost.exe

Iproute 2 -> You like netsh.exe?

Gnome 3, 4 -> Windows 8 wannabe

Mono -> C# road building path

GConf -> Windows Registry; heck, dconf-editor and gconf-editor look really close.

Can't wait for MMC.exe and GPO editing under Gnome.

BeetleB• 7 months ago

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.

I dunno man. Emacs is awesome.

Gualdrapo2• 7 months ago

I don't think they implied that old software is always bad.

yxhuvud2• 7 months ago

Plenty of the implementation not so much, however.

mongol• 7 months ago

Could not MQTT form the base of a new desktop bus? At least one half of it. It does not specify everything, but would it not be good foundation?

0x4575• 7 months ago

MQTT solves the transport, which really isn't an issue. It solves nothing beyond that.

zzo38computer3• 7 months ago

I do not like D-Bus either, and I do not like JSON either. Some of the problems are the ones mentioned there, and it has many other problems as well (one of these is that its use of Unicode can cause problems, but there is a lot more problems than just that). I do not agree with the solutions mentioned there either, although they do make some improvements, there are also some problems.

A better way would be a different operating system design, although without that, you can still improve it on Linux. I think putting secrets in the message bus is not really the way to do sandboxing properly, and I think there should not be a global message bus (it should be specific to a program; if the program is properly sandboxed it can be limited what it can access, and possibly they can be declared by the use of environment variables, although).

There are also problems with the existing sandboxing systems; e.g. some do not work properly with character sets and might not support such things as: popen, command-line arguments of the program to restrict which files can be read/written, etc.

For security for programs running on the same computer communicating with each other while they are running, cryptographic algorithms are probaly not the way to do it; the operating system should handle the security to prevent programs from seeing and/or tampering with something that it is not supposed to do, so that the communication between programs is prevented unless it is configured to allow it.

For the data format, I might use DER (or SDER for the fields that are not required to be in canonical form, since canonical form does not matter for all fields but for some it might matter).

(The implementation would prevent messages from being sent to or received from whoever it is not supposed to be allowed to do, by checking the permissions and/or by just blocking access, forwarding the messages to proxies that might modify and/or log them, etc; such things can potentially make the system more versatile.)

peanut-walrus2• 7 months ago

So everyone has wanted "year of the Linux desktop" for a while. This year, since Microsoft has decided to call open season on their own feet and Valve has taken a break from swimming in their money pool to make sure absolutely any piece of software ever written can run on Linux, it looks like this might actually be happening. I am seeing a massive influx of new users, driven by distros like Cachy, Nobara, Bazzite. A lot of them don't have previous Linux experience and are generally not the most technically savvy users.

This absolutely terrifies me. Linux desktop security is, to put it politely, nonexistant. And the culture that goes with Linux desktop users just makes things worse, there's still a lot of BOFH gatekeeping going on, laughing at the new users when they inevitably mess something up and worst of all, completely refusing to admit that the Linux desktop has security issues. Whenever a new user asks what antivirus they should run, they are usually met with derision and ridicule, because the (oldschool) Linux users genuinely think their computers are somehow immune and can never be hacked.

The first cybercriminals to put some development effort into Linux ransomware/stealers are going to wreak havoc and a lot of people are going to be in for a rude awakening. The D-Bus issue with secrets in the article is just one of many many many ways in which Linux desktops are insecure by design.

There are of course distros out there that take security seriously, but we are not really seeing new users migrating to Qubes en masse.

Edit: not calling out the distros above in particular, all 3 are doing very good work and are not really any worse in security than most other distros.

Dylan16807• 7 months ago

Any windows program you download can steal all your secrets too. The only operating systems that isolate programs by default are on phones (and chromebooks).

peanut-walrus2• 7 months ago

Unless you give it admin permissions, it really can't (admittedly, a lot of Windows users do run their computers with their admin account by default). Also, Windows users generally have at least some kind of anti-malware running, which, while not perfect, does work well against most spray-and-pray malware out there.

Edit: did some research, I must correct myself, the stealers have indeed evolved so admin permissions are not required for most credentials on Windows either.

However, should "strictly speaking, not really worse than Windows" be the security target we aim for in Linux?

mahkoh• 7 months ago

Back when I was writing xdg-desktop-portal-hyprland, I had to use a few dbus protocols (xdg portals run on dbus) to implement some of the communication. If we go to the portal documentation, we can find the protocols.
[...]
None of the apps, I repeat, fucking none followed the spec. [...]
Fun fact: THIS IS STILL THE CASE! The spec advertises a "restore_token" string prop on SelectSources and Start, where no app does this and uses "restore_data" in "options".

Wrong. xdg-desktop-portal has a client API and a compositor API. In the client API the property is called restore_token [1]. In the compositor API the property is called restore_data [2]. Clients do not talk directly to the compositor, they talk to the xdg-desktop-portal application which then talks to the compositor. It is not surprising the the properties would not be called the same.

In the documentation the APIs for app developers and desktop developers are clearly separated on the left hand side [3]. Not only does this have nothing to do with DBus (it would apply to every API where a middleware is used to translate messages), it also shows that the author did not do his due dilligence.

[1] https://flatpak.github.io/xdg-desktop-portal/docs/doc-org.fr...

[2] https://flatpak.github.io/xdg-desktop-portal/docs/doc-org.fr...

[3] https://flatpak.github.io/xdg-desktop-portal/docs/

Sprocklem• 7 months ago

It is not surprising the the properties would not be called the same.

It is a bit surprising that xdg-desktop-portal has two very similar APIs that differ in non-obvious and seemingly-arbitrary ways. I was also a bit confused about how the two APIs correspond (or don’t) when I first read their documentation.

phkahler• 7 months ago

Put OS calls on the bus. IMHO we need to add permissions to most user-space APIs so apps don't need to be sandboxed in a VM for security. Is this what SE Linux is? But I sometimes want permission to be granted by the user. For example, I don't want programs to be able to access files unless the user specifies the file - this might be through direct interaction with a GUI, or if we're really smart/tricky enabled if a filename comes on the command line typed by the user. I hope this makes sense, a way to gate system access via normal user input. Is this a reasonable possibility, or am I dreaming too big?

wpm5• 7 months ago

This is more or less how a lot of it works on macOS via the “Transparency, Consent, and Control” subsystem. Even non-sandboxed apps cannot just go rooting around my Desktop without the OS throwing a popup up asking me if it’s ok.

zzo38computer3• 7 months ago

I think the way to do should be capability-based security. However, that is suitable for a new operating system design (and computer design, too, for some reasons).

For Linux, we can do something else, although something similar may be possible. However, it seems that seccomp does not allow the function to send and receive file descriptors, nor to wait for one of any file descriptors in a set (like the "select" function), etc, so it is rather limited, and will require another process to proxy all of these functions. (Wikipedia says seccomp also disables RDTSC; my own system design would not even have such a thing, because I would want to restrict all I/O including high-precision timing; but I would also want to restrict CPUID and stuff like that too.) Capsicum might be better, at least for BSD (although I don't know if it disables RDTSC or CPUID).

I had thought of making a sandbox library tha should not require many changes to the program (although some changes will be needed); this can be used to specify the permissions needed involving files, popen, command-line arguments, network functions, timing, etc, and functions to request input in various character sets, and to request other things as well such as file names, and the host name and port number when connecting to internet, etc.

egorfine2• 7 months ago

I believe someone from systemd should reimplement d-bus in rust. This way we can have all the things we hate in a single instance.

klooney• 7 months ago

https://varlink.org/ systemd already has

egorfine2• 7 months ago

Problem is, varlink has been created to alleviate the pain while what I'm looking for here is even more suffering. Perhaps add AI and MCP into the mix. At kernel level with hard dependency on sudo-rs. And local RPC should be blockchain-based.

p_l8• 7 months ago

The systemd team mainly writes in (IMHO) horrible C, for one.

But bigger issue is they already tried to push their ideas about d-bus around, and got finally mogged so hard it got canceled.

0manrho• 7 months ago

I sympathize, but also, the XKCD about Standards comes to mind: https://xkcd.com/927/

bsoles• 7 months ago

A lot of people quote this xkcd comic for each new implementation. However, this is not exactly the same.

Well... It is exactly the same.

wryun• 7 months ago

OpenWrt devs had this epiphany many years ago:

https://openwrt.org/docs/techref/ubus https://openwrt.org/docs/techref/ubus#what_s_the_difference_...

(no endorsement implied; in particular, ubus has not much of a security model, though OpenWrt has an excuse for that)

chasil5• 7 months ago

As I understand it, systemctl uses D-Bus to send commands to systemd. I have read that systemd implemented their own D-Bus which is faster than stand-alone D-Bus.

So this gives me pause:

'Ever seen kwallet or gnome-keyring? Yeah, these things. These are supposed to be "secret storage" for things like signing keys, passwords, etc. They can be protected by a password, which means they are secure... right? No. No, they aren't. These secrets may be encrypted on disk, which technically prevents them from being stolen if your laptop is stolen. If you just cringed at that because disk encryption has been a thing for 20 years now or so, you're not alone. However, the best thing is this: any app on the bus can read all secrets in the store if the store is unlocked. No, this is not a #%&@ing joke. Once you input that password, any app can just read all of them without you noticing."

So, how does systemd ensure that D-Bus commands cannot originate from an unprivileged account?

Does systemd's D-Bus implementation use a different security architecture than stand-alone D-Bus?

I admit that I don't know anything about these mechanisms.

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1lxd0hl/systemctl_vs...

zokier• 7 months ago

polkit

tremon• 7 months ago

systemd accepts commands from the system bus (i.e. the dbus instance running as uid 0). User desktops have their own session bus, which runs as the user.

chasil5• 7 months ago

Thanks, that makes sense.

Still, for user-level systemd, that means the bus is open to any binary running with the user's credentials.

This is not any worse than the risk of running ssh-agent, though.

17186274402• 7 months ago

The GNOME project disagrees with this vulnerability report because, according to their stated security model, untrusted applications must not be allowed to communicate with the secret service.
Applications sandboxed via Flatpak only have filtered access to the session bus.

While I see why they think this is a bad answer it really reminds me of this: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20060508-22/?p=31... . Also they did not cite the last statement in their quote and made screenshots, so the quotes are not copyable. Who the hell does that?

ottah• 7 months ago

Wayland, thow shall not screenshot without root.

D-Bus, YOLo!

17186274402• 7 months ago

I am not a fan of Wayland either, I rather want to be able to run programs from different users against the same application server. This works just fine on Xorg.

imiric3• 7 months ago

Back when I was writing xdg-desktop-portal-hyprland

Ah, yes, XDG "portals". The reason file selection and screencasting is broken on every new Linux/Wayland installation I do, forcing me to try to understand the insane matrix of supported, half-supported, broken, and unsupported features by the dozen+ different implementations, and come up with the magic configuration incantation that makes it work on my system. Brilliant stuff. But it's secure!

That is why, I've decided to take matters into my own hands. I am writing a new bus.

Oh, goody. The author quotes xkcd/927 as if anticipating the response, when it's exactly appropriate for this situation.

For example, with wayland, when you switch, you abandon X. You cannot run an X11 session together with a wayland one, simply not how it works.

Huh? I use niri, and had to install both Xwayland and xwayland-satellite to get some of my apps working. I have no idea what either does, and even less interest in figuring it out, but it sure sounds like some X compatibility layer. Please tell me more about how much X, and now D-Bus, sucks.

I switched to Wayland a few months ago, and I'm happy that things mostly work now, but it seems that reinventing the wheel is the M.O. of developers in the Wayland community. Everyone is tired of everyone else's shit, has a superiority complex as evidenced by this ranty article, and has the urge to recreate literally every tool in the ecosystem that works for their own specific use case. Case in point: the dozens of tools that start with `hypr`. I guess we can add "tavern" now to that, whatever the fuck it is.

I'm tired of the state and direction of modern Linux. I wish I could use OpenBSD and leave this constant churn and bickering behind.

EDIT: Ah, it seems the author agrees with me: https://blog.vaxry.net/articles/2024-linuxInfighting

They're pointing out toxic behavior, favoring constructive criticism, and yet engage in the same behavior they're criticizing. Wild. How we ended up with these people as leaders in the Linux community is beyond me.

An important part of actually advancing a product forward is to cooperate.

100%. Maybe they should heed their own wisdom.

javier23• 7 months ago

Hmm, screencasting is finally working properly for me now. It was a loooong road...

imiric3• 7 months ago

Oh, it works for me too, but unless you're using a distro or DE that preconfigures it for you, you have to do it yourself. Which I'm used to on Void Linux and usually don't mind, but it's a horrendous UX that I just didn't have to deal with on X11.

zzo38computer3• 7 months ago

Ah, yes, XDG "portals". The reason file selection and screencasting is broken on every new Linux/Wayland installation I do, forcing me to try to understand the insane matrix of supported, half-supported, broken, and unsupported features by the dozen+ different implementations, and come up with the magic configuration incantation that makes it work on my system. Brilliant stuff. But it's secure!

Is there some way to avoid such a mess (and other problems with XDG portals and other XDG stuff) by substituting a .so file, somehow? I don't really know enough about how it works to know whether or not such a thing would work. (Maybe it might work for some programs, depending on which libraries they use for this purpose.)

imiric3• 7 months ago

I have a very vague familiarity with how it works, but I don't think there are alternatives. If you're using Wayland, you either have to rely on a distro or DE to configure it for you, or do it yourself.

To be fair: I don't think the idea behind portals is necessarily bad. But the half-baked implementations that all do things slightly differently is a pretty bad UX overall.

ghusto2• 7 months ago

However, the best thing is this: any app on the bus can read all secrets in the store if the store is unlocked
> The GNOME project disagrees with this vulnerability report because, according to their stated security model, untrusted applications must not be allowed to communicate with the secret service.

I'd like to point out for anyone on the fence that yes, Gnome is run by clowns in full sized clown shoes.

Asooka3• 7 months ago

Fortunately today with AI everyone CAN actually audit all the code for all the software running on their machine themselves by sending it to a black box cloud service, thereby running only software they KNOW they can trust! /s

tocariimaa• 7 months ago

"works as intended wontfix conversation locked"

skydhash3• 7 months ago

I always thought as the secret for things that should not be saved non-encrypted on disk, not for things that should be kept hidden from other applications. And if that is your threat model, you should look into virtual machines.

WD-42• 7 months ago

That’s exactly what it’s for. Parent is just being rude for no reason.

rnhmjoj4• 7 months ago

There are no excuses, this protocol is just terrible: it could have been made much much more secure without any kind of virtualisation or sandboxing.

For example, the kernel could be used[1] to store the secrets in memory and only authorize the userspace process that created it to read it; other processes could request access to a secret and only be given if you accept.

[1] https://docs.kernel.org/security/keys/core.html

rcxdude• 7 months ago

This is especially amazing given how much of wayland friction is in the name of security ("Why would we ever standardise a way to intercept and send keystrokes? it's not secure!")

rnhmjoj4• 7 months ago

Yes, it's 100% a security theatre. Programs aren't even allowd to set their own icon because it's not considered secure, I'm not joking. The reasoning goes something like: what if a malicious program set its name to "firefox" and uses the firefox icon and then prompts you for the gmail password, eh?

At the same time a malware can just get all of your passwords without even asking using d-bus or read all of your files since it's running as your uid.

sigotirandolas• 7 months ago

The security model is that applications run in a sandbox (e.g. Flatpak, snap) and only get D-Bus, Wayland, etc. access via restricted means (e.g. xdg-dbus-proxy).

The "friction" is that Wayland developers don't want a sandboxed application with access to the Wayland socket to pwn your machine.

Trying to isolate applications within the same UNIX user is essentially unfixable since there's ptrace, LD_PRELOAD, /proc/$pid, .bashrc drop-ins, etc.

The author must know about all of this, as it's mentioned in the LD_PRELOAD note in the end. In my view, the model he proposes is security by obscurity (putting hurdles on top of a fundamentally insecure system).

Spivak3• 7 months ago

Program running as user can read data owned by user. If this is a vulnerability then the entire linux userspace is compromised. Can you believe that applications I run can execute gpg2 and steal all my secrets?

The dbus process is run by and owned by your user. The only people that can access it is you and root. There is a system-wide bus but your secret manager isn't using that one.

It's just this: https://xkcd.com/1200/

wpm5• 7 months ago

It’s almost as if the user/group/everyone permission model developed for time sharing mainframes isn’t sufficient anymore for absolutely everything anymore.

pbalau3• 7 months ago

I think this is missing the main problem with security on a Linux Desktop, the user. All an attacker has to do is to convince the user to run InstallSteamWithAllGamesUnlockedForFree.sh You know, the AnnaKurnikovaSexTape.exe of the windows world.

This is an education problem and no amount of tech is going to fix it.

Even if dbus didn't have this problem, this is my hardware, I'll do what I want! That's the whole point of Linux.

dijit4• 7 months ago

nearly everything talks dbus, even browser extensions.

It’s even more serious than running untrusted shell scripts.

r_lee• 7 months ago

browser extensions? you mean like Chrome ones etc? never heard of that being a thing

pbalau3• 7 months ago

That's not the problem. The real problem is that if I convince you to run my script, it's going to be quite easy to convince you to give me extra permissions, so I can get to your data. It really irks me when things like Cargo are doing exactly that, make me run a sh script. Cargo and the likes, are making running sh scripts way too common.

tmtvl3• 7 months ago

Forget running some random downloaded shell script, just needs to convince the user to curl some-url/do-some-cool-thing | bash.

smetannik• 7 months ago

Sometimes I feel that it would be easy to just take parts of Android instead of reinventing the wheel.

candide771• 7 months ago

I think this rant is more about Gnome than about dbus. Yes - there's a lot of Worse is better (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better) design in there.

And yes the default and in particular the glib implementations are horrible. The sdbus implementation is way cleaner.

The claims about "everybody can call everything" are just wrong. There are bus policies and if you care you define them. That being said - the desktop people don't care. But that's not a problem of the dbus design.

Look at CORBA or DCOM. You don't really want that either.

dolmen2• 7 months ago

An important part of adoption will probably be bindings to other languages. The libraries are all in C++, but since they aren't very big (by design), making Rust / Go / Python bindings shouldn't be hard for someone experienced with those languages.

If the the protocol is that clean, make a formal specification for it that can be used to generate client code.

A binding to C++ is definitely not what I want in my Go program.

Asooka3• 7 months ago

One more thing: D-Bus has the concept of generic services which can be automatically started, e.g. org.freedesktop.FileManager1. When you send a command to that service, the file manager will be started if it is not already running. However, there is no mechanism for the user to select which file manager to start, so if you happen to have both KDE and GNOME installed you have a 50:50 chance of launching dolphin or nautilus. See for example: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/778028/set-a-specif... . It truly boggles the mind.

seba_dos15• 7 months ago

D-Bus has no concept of generic services. People are using D-Bus to get automatic startup of generic services even though it's not fit for this purpose. It's quite a different thing.

You could build a viable solution on top of D-Bus though, it's just that apparently nobody bothered so far.

seba_dos15• 7 months ago

While there is some valid criticism to be held against D-Bus and its implementations (there's more than one in common use), this article never goes there. It appears to be just an incoherent rambling of someone with poor understanding of how systems work together.

TacticalCoder• 7 months ago

Here's my favourite D-Bus setting when I compile Emacs:

    --without-dbus

Been using it like this for years, many versions of Emacs and everything Just Works [TM] without D-Bus.

throw7• 7 months ago

I never took d-bus seriously because they said that when dbus was updated you could not just restart the dbus daemon, you were required to hard reboot.

notnullorvoid• 7 months ago

I was under the impression that the security concerns there are handled by AppArmor and SELinux (though maybe not granular access control to secrets). Which all desktop Linux installs should be using one or the other, because there's much more than just D-Bus that can be a security risk.

jauntywundrkind• 7 months ago

this post has killed my interest in hyprland.

dbus is super frustrating to work with: yes!

but what we see here isn't an argument to convince technical people. it's flaming. with no links, no references, just clipping things out of context to make everything look as bad as it can.

dbus actually has policies! the gnome developers aren't saying: there should be no security. they are saying: use the security boundary that we have in place! use allow lists! deny lists! but like every argument in this post, there are no hyperlinks, no references, no way to see in depth what the situation really is: it's a hatchet job, designed not to inform & illuminate, but to cast a shadow over & to conceal the real depths of the issues.

this sort of behavior is garbage, and i have no interest in being in an ecosystem with such fallen, misdirecting, bad behaving deceitfulness. every one of these complaints bends and conceals the complexity of the situation, far more than illuminates bad spots.

there's hundreds or thousands of people who are going to join this dark crusade, going to bandwagon up & break out pitchforks. based off incredibly incomplete misrepresentations of the situation at large. this post is such a wicked harm bringer. this deserves quarantine, needs containment.

jzer0cool• 7 months ago

Someone know any technique to watch what sent to the Dbus from running A. I want to then redo and implement my own A. Welcome any steps I can take.

moggers123• 7 months ago

Back when I was writing xdg-desktop-portal-hyprland

Bahaha. I could have guessed. My only interaction with D-Bus as a layman is xdg-desktop-protocol. Is there just something about that particular use case that makes it so... Obnoxious? I presume all kinds of applications on my computer are right now busily d-bussing away without my notice, but getting xdg-desktop-protocol working with wlroots involved pentagrams and tomes bound in human skin.

rendaw2• 7 months ago

Why is a generic bus protocol even needed?

Using http over unix domain sockets, or even making a simple protocol over unix domain sockets with a size header + json payloads is trivial in most languages. Unix domain sockets work with standard linux permissions, you can access them with curl, you can forward them with ssh, you can mount them in containers, etc etc. One socket per service.

D-Bus is an overcomplicated mess all over the place. You have services, interfaces, paths, _and_ methods to classify messages yet messages are still only partially qualified and rely on one connection per message flow. There are return message ids, but some services use polling instead. And even if you have D-Bus you still need to know application-specific protocol details to make any sense of the messages. Application protocols leak wire details into messages (i.e. video access requests duplicate random dbus identifiers in payloads) which makes handling dbus messages generically for e.g. proxying impossible anyway.

wltr• 7 months ago

Another one censored title.

M95D• 7 months ago

I don't have dbus installed on my linux due to security and privacy concerns. How is this new bus any better?

- Does it allow applications to enumerate what other apps are installed in the system (connected to the bus), without being explicitly allowed by the admin to do that?

- Does it allow apps to talk to each other without being explicitly allowed by the admin?

- Does it allow apps to "publish" data that anyone can read?

- Does it allow apps to "request" actions from other apps running with other privileges than themselves (elevation of privilege)?

Problems with D-Bus on the Linux desktop

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