Look I get it. You don't care about systemd. That's fine. You don't have to. It's not like systemd has killed anyone (yet). Personally I don't think murder is the best example of a morally bad thing to resort to for a universal standard. What are spiders supposed to do? Just not kill flies and stuff? Where do you get off telling them they are evil for that?! Anyway. SystemD systemd SYStemmieD is this thing. You probably know about? Maybe not. I'm not really sure who my target audience is at this point. But lets put it this way, in my other article about void Linux I talked about the kernel as "The event horizon" of complexity. Systemd sits very much on the other side of this debate, it wants to be that event horizon, it wants to /be/ the kernel. I have very little doubt that it will in time worm its way into the kernel in more and more ways. Maybe at some point we will have to have a discussion about forking Linux kernel development, but for now systemd is content to just making their toolset larger and larger and being de facto required for nearly all software packages that "Matter". I have some qualms you might say. And dbus is the name of that qualm. D-Bus dbus libdbusd Idk So it's this way daemons (software faeries) talk to each other. It provides a standardized way for this to occur. It also mediates between hardware messages and software that might care about those messages, a kind of quick-ware layer providing non-real-time interrupts to and from various digitized life. If you plug in your USB device, it is one of the more important layers that may trigger, to let your file browser know to refresh for example. (this is a totally simplistic example.) I know it makes sense that there should be a standardized way for this to happen. Hell I'm writing this in English, you think I don't understand the utility of a nice common abstraction layer to mediate between various processes that have the need to communicate various pertinent information to and from each other? Do you think I'm retarded? (Also I was born in a place where it was the default, but I'm pretty sure had I not, I'd have ended up learning just because it is /such/ a good idea to know... But anyway.) Utility as a concept is... Kinda loaded itself after all isn't it? Same as productive. It can only really be measured subjectively. Something that aids in accomplishing the goals you have created is useful. Something that does this for a wide variety of disparate goals is something that provides utility. That the internet should be considered a utility I think is beyond understood. Anyway, this is about dbus. Now I was (for some reason) under the impression that dbus was one of the systemd libraries. I was of course half right. It's true that dbus is not a systemd library, but it's also true that one of the more commonly used (due to it's speed for the most part) implementations. D-Bus is a standard. Any Joe Shmoe could (theoretically) create their own fancy implementation, and any other service that is designed to operate within the confines of that standard should work without having known the wiser that it was being mediated by libjoeschmoswonderfuldbus rather than libsdbus or whatever. This is nice. I suppose. And it kind of takes the wind out of my sail. But it is helpful, in that it is helping me learn to stop worrying about installing dbus. Now. I don't like that this thing is apparently needed for most of the software I use. I don't like pulseaudio either. I don't like English for that matter. I tend to be of the opinion that the environment that one finds themselves in effects the decision one makes and more importantly the very thoughts that can be had. It frustrates me endlessly that my thoughts have been shaped by having been forced to learn English at a young language and that had I been taught and raised in a place that spoke reformed Ketoan instead I might actually be able to move mountains with my mind because in reality those mountains would be as tangible as the thought of mountain in the first place. But alas here I am, convinced of physical reality as objective truth. And here I sit using a window system which communicates messages between various services mediated in English, I mean dbus. And sometimes... It's just not worth making a fuss about it. (that is until I have enough force of will to completely restructure reality, there will be a fuss made then you can bet your corporeal ass on it.) .