AINEWS
Ubuntu 26.10 Moves Dbus-Broker to Main, Dbus-Daemon to Universe
A seven year wait traces to a single dependency: GNOME 49's GDM rework finally freed the default IPC bus that Fedora adopted in 2019.
A seven year wait traces to a single dependency: GNOME 49's GDM rework finally freed the default IPC bus that Fedora adopted in 2019.
The seven-year gap between Fedora's Dbus-Broker default and Ubuntu's decision to follow suit was not a matter of priorities. It was a chain of dependencies, and the last link in that chain only broke with the GNOME 49 release. Ubuntu 26.10 will install and enable Dbus-Broker as the default system message bus, moving the package to main and demoting the legacy dbus-daemon to universe, per an Ubuntu Discourse post by developer Alessandro Astone.
The change, reported by Phoronix on 12 June 2026, frames the switch in terms that have not changed since the original upstream pitch: better performance, greater reliability, and improved scalability. Those are the same claims that made Fedora comfortable adopting the project around 2019, and the same claims that Ubuntu developers had been eyeing for at least as long.
What actually blocked the move was narrower than the timeframe suggests. The blocker sat inside GNOME's display manager, GDM, which had long depended on dbus-run-session from the dbus-daemon package. As long as GDM needed that helper, the system could not default to a different bus implementation. GNOME 49 reworked GDM to drop the dbus-run-session dependency, and that change is what unblocked Ubuntu's move.
The Ubuntu-specific work did not end with the GNOME upstream fix. The distro had its own integration to complete around AppArmor mediation and Snap confinement, which interact with the bus differently than a vanilla upstream system. Those pieces had to be reconciled before a default switch was safe, and Astone's post is the public sign that the integration is now ready for the 26.10 cycle.
There is a longer game here. D-Bus itself is showing its age, and the broader community direction is toward BUS1, a more capable inter-process bus that several distributions have been tracking. By finally clearing the dbus-broker default, Ubuntu positions itself for that transition the same way Fedora did with this one: by paying down infrastructure debt on the existing bus so the next step is shorter.
For users of Ubuntu 26.10, the practical effect is invisible at the desktop. Services that registered with the system bus still register with the system bus. The difference shows up in how the bus handles high session counts, large numbers of name owners, and the failure modes that surfaced as freezes and stalls under heavy load. The old daemon is not gone; it is just one layer further from the default.