But having a daemon that relays your messages I agree, and I'm not opposed to the idea of a daemon. DBus just seems to be (from my perception) rather poorly d

But having a daemon that relays your messages I agree, and I'm not opposed to the idea of a daemon. DBus just seems to be (from my perception) rather poorly designed on every level. And the more pervasive it becomes the more of its bad design bleeds into more or less unrelated other software packages. the Unix-way is oversimplified for some problems The unix-way of course has limits, but it's usually worth to explore it as far as possible and only then divert to more baroque designs. In the majority of cases you'll find that pure, file-based approaches are a lot more elegant, efficient, discoverable and debuggable than the alternatives (see e.g. qmail vs postfix, or runit). There's a lot to be said for being able to use the standard unix cutlery to inspect and interact with the guts of your application. Imagine DBus was just a directory with one or two files per pid. Imagine you could read past messages with 'cat', follow them with 'tail' and inject new ones with 'echo'.