Will your installation work without dbus? by: Anti-DBus

Remove DBus, ConsoleKit, PolicyKit, PAM, new udev, systemd, freedesktop cancer

by: Anti-DBus

Greetings. I have completed a successful DBus removal. Stragglers were ghostscript-gpl, which was removed, cups, which was also removed and all the dependent programs recompiled to live without it, changing it for lprng (the old Berkeley printer spooler, updated), barring icedtea-bin, which was changed to icedtea and built without any build time dependency, sgt-puzzles (removed), winetricks (sadly removed), qtwidgets (all the programs that needed it were recompiled to not to), qtbittorrent (changed for rtorrent as rutorrent has php and bloat), libreoffice (changed for openoffice-bin, as amazingly it doesn’t have need for dbus or even GTK3; it was chosen to avoid sketchy Chinese poor support and paid support office suites such as WPS and Softmaker), notification-daemon (I actually never used it for anything, ever, as redshift pops up its icon without a notification), nvidia-drivers (recompiled without tools), and such.

Beside removing DBus, I also removed ConsoleKit, PolicyKit, qtwidgets, and PAM. The only thing that remains to be removed is udev, changing it for mdev or even static dev, and possibly dhcpcd, switching it for a static configuration.

It is good to see people decrying DBus, systemd and such cancers for what they really are.

editor: Interesting project. What system was this done on? Devuan?

this project was done on Gentoo. On almost any other OS, it would have required installing and manually maintaining a patched GTK3 without at-spi2-whatever dependencies.

There are things that will be missed, for example, video editors. Blender and Inkscape do work, according to emerge -(-)p(retend). Firefox stays alive.

I can install games such as FreeCiv and others after disabling the qt5 USE flag (curiously, as GTK is regarded as more dbus-dependent: this qt dependency is due of qtwidgets with GTK USE flag, qtgui with DBus USE flag [which turns itself on even though my global make.conf has -dbus], and by freeciv itself, which tries to hook itself into DBus if it has the qt5 and -dedicated USE flags set)

Icedtea didn’t let my system be updated because of the cups build-dependency, however, I masked (impeded from being considered for updates or for installs, etc; elogind is also masked, alongside systemd’s udev) xdg-utils (to add to the dbus mask), which made the build dependency complaint stop (apparently, masking enough of the cancerous tree [DBus, xdg-utils, and Net-DBus {a perl module, for what reason??}] is enough for packages to stop wanting them).

Because of no gconf/dconf (the first has deeper cancerous roots, needing consolekit and policykit too), random binaries downloaded from the Internet may not work, some projects will be uncompilable (I think that generally these are the same ones whose binaries need gconf/dconf/libnotify/etc), and those who try to enable notifications, even if you have the Intention of disabling them, are stalled by the lack of libnotify.

As you are free of consolekit (and PAM), your “Last login” line is like so:
“Last login: (day) (date, in the form of, for instance, “Fri Jan 14″) (hour, with seconds) (GMT offset) (year) on (block device [for example, /dev/tty3]).”

As I had menctioned before, winetricks had to go, and that means that you will need to track down all the necessary windows libraries, etc, on your own (or scrape a winetricks online link list, and use those links).

Thanks to the power of source compilation, and the robust Portage package manager (and USE flags, etc), several-many formerly DBus enslaved programs are now free.

However, Libreoffice is an exception. Did you know that it requires, by the way of its KDE frameworks dependencies, ConsoleKit and PolicyKit, and thus DBus, even leaving its gconf/otherconf dependency aside, even with the kde flag disabled locally on it? This was almost fixed by a careful run of “USE=”-kde -gtk -gtk2 -dbus -cups -seccomp” emerge -p –autounmask-keep-masks libreoffice”: the USE section is to set local USE variables (BTW, -seccomp is to stop a whiny Kscreenlocker wanting PAM because of that particular flag), so to not make a file that specifies them for the particular package (/etc/portage/package.use[/* if you use files instead of a big list]) or globally (/etc/portage/make.conf), and –autounmask-keep-masks is to skip the attempted unmasking of pestering packages. This reduced the amount of cancer dependencies to 1 (xdg-utils), but 4 in practice, as xdg-utils pulls in DBus, with Net-DBus alongside it, ConsoleKit, and PolicyKit too.

Curiously, even programs compiled without DBus support opened dbus-launch instances, and killing these also killed the program. They may have been spawned by the unpatched GTK3. The affected programs work flawlessly now.

This is a general summing up of what has happened. I was using i3wm when I decided to make this change. I may switch to CDE (yes, the Common Desktop Environment itself, at https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/; something to note is that dtlogin, the login manager, can support PAM as of the last update ever released by the Open Group [2.1{.X?}], back in 1999. The usage of PAM is defined as “NO” [aka off] in dtlogin’s source [all of CDE is under the LGPLv2, as with Motif.

I hope that you all can manage to escape DBus and such cancers successfully.

Peace.