D-Bus

Raised as a usability problem by 10 people on Hacker News over 14 years (2012–2025), in 9 threads.

People raised many different problems with D-Bus, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 10 complaints

Applications sometimes fail to start from terminal, unpredictably, despite X11 working elsewhere2025-09-11
Code generators can't handle real-world schemas and structure fields can't be named2024-09-29
Holding PrintScreen for three seconds overloads D-Bus and freezes the whole system2022-11-07
Dbus is so ridiculously complex to work with2022-01-24
Very hard to use outside of writing a complex program2019-07-08
D-Bus interfaces are poorly documented, making it unclear what connects where2016-03-09
Hard for unprivileged users to mount a USB stick without a full desktop environment2015-02-10
Documentation is poor and contradictory, so people give up learning DBus2014-11-23
Design is wonky, poorly documented, and very difficult to debug or understand2014-11-23
Poor and undocumented interface made hooking mail notifications through DBUS horrible2012-02-15