I'm not sure there is. They're all separate projects, that just happen to be the standard linux tech stack everyone(Except the people who don't) agree on. It

I'm not sure there is. They're all separate projects, that just happen to be the standard linux tech stack everyone(Except the people who don't) agree on. It would be cool to write a guide to Linux programming that went over all the stuff you should know to do it the modern way. dbus is a message bus that lets apps communicate. But it's object oriented and corba-ish and really complicated. It's wonderful if you don't have to think about it and are just copying and pasting. If you have to actually think about it , it becomes just OK. I'm still a big fan though. Also, it's not really a pure message bus, it also does stuff like RPC calls. It's not just an MQTT type thing. Gstreamer is a node based audio framework. It is the second best way to handle media as far as I'm concerned, the best being to not do so at all and use existing stuff because media always seems to be a nightmare in new ways every time. You mostly never touch any actual media. You just set up nodes with code. glib is a utility library that has to to with the GTK and gnome people , like gstreamer. It tries to give C the things that other languages I'd rather be using have. I'd still rather be using them instead. There's also gobj. They have this object thing for C and they can auto generate bindings for python with introspection. This is how gstreamer works in python. Unfortunately it is totally possible to make resources leaks and such using those bindings, autocomplete won't work, you may get unhelpful error messages, or just annoying unpythonic things, and you will probably need GDB to debug any segfaults, should you want to do anything very complicated.