D-Bus
| Desktop Bus | |
|---|---|
| Developer(s) | Red Hat |
| Initial release | November 2006 |
| Stable release | 1.16.2
/ 27 February 2025 |
| Repository | |
| Written in | C |
| Operating system | Cross-platform |
| Predecessor | CORBA DCOP |
| Type | |
| License | GPLv2+ or AFL 2.1 |
| Website | www |
D-Bus (short for "Desktop Bus") is a message-oriented middleware mechanism that allows communication between multiple processes running concurrently on the same machine. D-Bus was developed as part of the freedesktop.org project, initiated by GNOME developer Havoc Pennington to standardize services provided by Linux desktop environments such as GNOME and KDE.
The freedesktop.org project also developed a free and open-source software library called libdbus, as a reference implementation of the specification. This library is not D-Bus itself, as other implementations of the D-Bus specification also exist, such as GDBus (GNOME), QtDBus (Qt/KDE), dbus-java and sd-bus (part of systemd).