Earlier quoted context omitted.
DBUS would probably be closer to DCOM or even the Amiga's ARexx ports. Granted, with that plus XEmbed, you could get a lot of the benefits without an explicit object model/component system, but I haven't seen that done a lot in action. Linux users mostly go for 70s shell/pipes to cobble together parts. Better than nothing, but man, such wasted opportunities (and even something that doesn't require Lisp/Smalltalk/Ober…
KDE 2 was super scriptable through dcop, and also had embeddable UI compnents with KParts (or was that in 3?). My first job after high school was QA for Lindows, and I used dcop to automate testing of their app store client (2002-2003).
It is still like that, however it doesn't help when people just stay on konsole and don't learn what their desktop is capable of.