dbus is a sort-of standardised way for applications to communicate; generally used so that a service can make itself available to clients (e.g. battery status,

dbus is a sort-of standardised way for applications to communicate; generally used so that a service can make itself available to clients (e.g. battery status, bluetooth devices, plenty of other things that I don't happen to use). Generally I only start it if an application won't work without it. Biggest issues for me (personally) is it's linux-specific and (unless I'm missing something) limited to the current host); otherwise it's client-agnostic sockets FTW.