Yep. D-Bus feels, honestly, like someone looked at every RPC mechanism ever invented and decided to pile all their bad parts into one thing. It's not discoverable, it has a frustrating permission system, its interface definition is incredibly verbose with a very low information density, etc.
Of course, the fact that you need a full DE to easily mount a usb stick as a non-privileged user means the whole thing is already failing hard. This is not how this should work.
> Of course, the fact that you need a full DE to easily mount a usb stick as a non-privileged user means the whole thing is already failing hard. This is not how this should work.
This is not true. I use udiskctl (and thus the udisks2-polkit-dbus based machinery) to mount pendrives in a vty on a regular basis.
As a bonus, it asks for my password (the user one, not the root one) if i'm in an ssh terminal instead of a vty, and by configuring polkit i can have it allow me (only this particular user) to put a certain HDD to sleep (and no other actions like giving rights on the block device would do) without root password.
As best i understand, dbus came about as an attempt at making the KDE only dcop into something that could be used across DEs. This to improve interoperability between them.
dcop worked beautifully; the only problem was that the gnome team had religious objections to depending on C++. It was never intended to be a system-level thing though, and that's where a lot of the problems come from; within a desktop session dbus actually works pretty well.
Of course, the fact that you need a full DE to easily mount a usb stick as a non-privileged user means the whole thing is already failing hard. This is not how this should work.