Fixing dleyna-renderer crashes on Gnome

Following an upgrade from Fedora 40 to 41, I started getting repeated crash notifications for dleyna-renderer (again). I feel like I never really noticed this crashing in Fedora 40, but I have memories of it from previous versions. Following the upgrade to F41 the dreaded "Problem Reporting" notifications were back.

I can recall having the same issues on Ubuntu desktops from a many years ago as well as from previous Fedora installs - and pretty much any google search for dleyna-renderer has more than a handfull of results on forums, reddit, etc of people suffering from repeated crashes of the service.

dleyna is a set of libraries and services which aim to simplify access to DLNA servers or media devices on a network. It's origins are from Intel's Open Source Ecosystem, however, the project has been discontinued by Intel quite some time ago and the current version is hosted with gnome.

It's possible these repeated crashes only happen when such a device is present on the network, and gnome is trying to communicate via dleyna's DBUS service for returning results in the overview (since I don't use applications making use of dleyna - see below).

I decided to do more digging with some dnf repoquery --whatdepends commands to search the dependencies to see what apps I had that were depending on the dleyna-renderer, dleyna-server and dleyna. This revealed that gnome-photos and grilo-plugins were using it directly, and following the chain to see what was using grilo-plugins led to gnome-music and gnome-videos (aka totem).

These are default gnome apps which I don't actually use, so the quick win was to remove them with dnf remove gnome-photos totem gnome-music and make sure all dependencies were removed with a final dnf autoremove.

Win, win. I got rid of the repeating crash notifications and cleared out a few apps I wasn't using anyway.