6 ms·

Creating another group every time and asking the sysadmin to add you to the group when you want a new permission is not an appropriate solution for the desktop.

Creating another group every time and asking the sysadmin to add you to the group when you want a new permission is not an appropriate solution for the desktop. It also isn't fine grained (what if you want to only grant permission to one audio device, then you'll need to create lots of audio groups and keep track of them all) and doesn't handle the case where you want to temporarily grant privileges to some device for just one session. There is more to it than just the issue with ssh, and it's not superfluous. There is a very good reason desktops all use it.

denton-scratch 5y ago
> There is a very good reason desktops all use it. FSVO "all". Mine doesn't use it. If I have a task that needs elevated privileges, I run it from a terminal. Seems to work for me.
- throwawaysysd 5y ago
  Sorry but if you keep falling back to the terminal to do things I would say you're not really using a desktop. What's the purpose of pointing this out? Yes, you can do whatever you want in Linux by opening the terminal and typing sudo. I understand the propensity of developers to like this because we spend all day in our xterm windows anyway but this is not the way anyone else expects a desktop to work. Just to follow this discussion a bit further: If you have a task that /really/ needs elevated privileges you could turn it into a kernel module. That's great for you if you want to do that, but will you tell everyone else to develop kernel modules for every little thing? I don't think I would. I'm happy to give the muggles a better interface.
  - denton-scratch 5y ago
    I have no "desktop" tasks that need elevated privileges. I only use a GUI because I want to run things like a browser and a media player. If I need elevated privileges it's always a one-off job, which means I need a commandline anyway. There's a bunch of influential people that are bent on making "Linux desktop" be something that competes effectively with Windows and MacOS. Setting aside that I don't think those are particularly desirable objectives in the first place, I simply don't see it happening. Despite their deficiencies, Windows and MacOS work better than Linux desktops. A lot of the Linux desktop effort seems to really be "Linux laptop" - Linux support for machines that are constantly moving from one hotspot to another, and constantly having storage and other devices plugged in and unplugged. That isn't my use-case. Most of my Linux machines are servers with no GUI. The one with a GUI doesn't travel, and gets something plugged into it maybe once a month. I realise that my usage pattern isn't universal; I was just correcting the claim that "all desktops use it". You only need one counterexample to refute such a claim.
    - foxfluff 5y ago
      > There's a bunch of influential people that are bent on making "Linux desktop" be something that competes effectively with Windows and MacOS. And not necessarily with the interests of Windows or MacOS end users, but more corporate interests. I think a lot of Windows users for example were and would still be fine with a system that is effectively a single-user desktop. A permission prompt to prevent random apps from spying on you using your microphone and camera is probably a Good Idea for the average user but all this user policy business is just pointless; users themselves should always have access to their own devices anyway, just as they would on old Windows installs where the user was typically the only user and always administrator. And yeah, I don't like that a few people get to define what exactly constitutes a desktop for everyone. Especially if under the guise of "this is what a modern desktop requires" they're free to turn the platform into a bloated, overcomplicated mess.. exactly the kind of thing I was happy to get away from when I left proprietary operating systems behind two decades ago.
      - throwawaysysd 5y ago
        I don't understand what you mean by a few people get to define it. This stuff is used by basically every desktop environment on Linux. You have to either use it or write something very similar to it if you want to have permission prompts that actually work. They all give the option to turn it off but they still have to support it for the average user you described. Unsurprisingly, the requirements for shipping a desktop are really not that different on Linux compared to other operating systems. The users all want the same things. From what I have seen, the amount of users that want to go back to the Windows 95 style of security are an even fewer people. You can find distros that still ship a desktop from that era but they don't seem to be for much beyond novelty.
        foxfluff 5y ago
        > The users all want the same things. Please don't speak for everyone. It's exactly this patronizing we-know-better-than-you attitude that makes users hate their corporate software vendors. > From what I have seen, the amount of users that want to go back to the Windows 95 style of security are an even fewer people. I knew someone would immediately reply with this straw man as soon as they saw mention of old Windows. I said user policies are pointless for a single-user desktop. It's irrelevant whether dave and samantha can access the audio device in john's session because dave and samantha don't exist on john's personal computer and he sure ain't running an ssh daemon for them.
throwaway984393 5y ago
What sysadmin are desktop users having to ask for permission to use their own hardware? Even in 2001, if you had a laptop, you had access to use all it's hardware. Why wouldn't you? How many groups do you think there are? There's only so many classes of hardware, so there's only so many groups. About 8 in total. You add the user to all of them at once. It worked just fine before polkit arrived. Why would you want to temporarily grant privileges to hardware once? Who is trying to prevent the user from using their own hardware? What's the very good reason all desktops use it?
- throwawaysysd 5y ago
  I detailed this in another comment, the reason desktops use it is to get those macOS-style permission dialogs that pop up when you try to take some privileged action. I don't think any desktop distribution wants to ask users to open a terminal and type "sudo usermod" and then log out and log back in in order to do something like setting the clock or formatting a usb drive. I don't remember this working well at all before polkit arrived either, I remember when device hotplug in Linux was really broken for this reason (and a few others). It's not reasonable to ask desktop users to edit udev rules when plugging in a new device. If it worked well at all it was because you were doing things like having a lot of suid/sgid tools or just running GUI programs as root which is a terrible idea. >Who is trying to prevent the user from using their own hardware? I don't understand this question. The functionality here is equivalent to sudo, you type your password to authenticate a certain action. As the sysadmin you can configure some actions to always accept or always deny, if you want.
  - michaelmrose 5y ago
    > As the sysadmin you can configure some actions to always accept or always deny, if you want You can do this with sudo too.
    - throwawaysysd 5y ago
      Yes, polkit does have some overlap with sudo. What it has over sudo is a real API, programs can use it to authenticate an IPC request for an action to a privileged daemon while that daemon is running.
michaelmrose 5y ago
Even though the situation described is strange to the point of having never happened in history you would still need to ask an admin to write policy to implement your interesting audio permission scheme just the same as one would need to ask an admin to add a group or you know automate the process with a gui or integrate the change in groups into updating or software installation. I am sure that somewhere having an actual programming language available vs list of what can and can't be run with or without a password would enable some additional power in terms of control of the system but I cannot for the life of me imagine a situation where it would be all that useful.
- throwawaysysd 5y ago
  I agree it's not particularly useful for home users, I expect most would go with the defaults provided by their distro and leave it there. This is meant for corporate deployments where sysadmins might need to write more advanced policies.

denton-scratch 5y ago

> There is a very good reason desktops all use it. FSVO "all". Mine doesn't use it. If I have a task that needs elevated privileges, I run it from a terminal. Seems to work for me.

throwawaysysd 5y ago
Sorry but if you keep falling back to the terminal to do things I would say you're not really using a desktop. What's the purpose of pointing this out? Yes, you can do whatever you want in Linux by opening the terminal and typing sudo. I understand the propensity of developers to like this because we spend all day in our xterm windows anyway but this is not the way anyone else expects a desktop to work. Just to follow this discussion a bit further: If you have a task that /really/ needs elevated privileges you could turn it into a kernel module. That's great for you if you want to do that, but will you tell everyone else to develop kernel modules for every little thing? I don't think I would. I'm happy to give the muggles a better interface.
- denton-scratch 5y ago
  I have no "desktop" tasks that need elevated privileges. I only use a GUI because I want to run things like a browser and a media player. If I need elevated privileges it's always a one-off job, which means I need a commandline anyway. There's a bunch of influential people that are bent on making "Linux desktop" be something that competes effectively with Windows and MacOS. Setting aside that I don't think those are particularly desirable objectives in the first place, I simply don't see it happening. Despite their deficiencies, Windows and MacOS work better than Linux desktops. A lot of the Linux desktop effort seems to really be "Linux laptop" - Linux support for machines that are constantly moving from one hotspot to another, and constantly having storage and other devices plugged in and unplugged. That isn't my use-case. Most of my Linux machines are servers with no GUI. The one with a GUI doesn't travel, and gets something plugged into it maybe once a month. I realise that my usage pattern isn't universal; I was just correcting the claim that "all desktops use it". You only need one counterexample to refute such a claim.
  - foxfluff 5y ago
    > There's a bunch of influential people that are bent on making "Linux desktop" be something that competes effectively with Windows and MacOS. And not necessarily with the interests of Windows or MacOS end users, but more corporate interests. I think a lot of Windows users for example were and would still be fine with a system that is effectively a single-user desktop. A permission prompt to prevent random apps from spying on you using your microphone and camera is probably a Good Idea for the average user but all this user policy business is just pointless; users themselves should always have access to their own devices anyway, just as they would on old Windows installs where the user was typically the only user and always administrator. And yeah, I don't like that a few people get to define what exactly constitutes a desktop for everyone. Especially if under the guise of "this is what a modern desktop requires" they're free to turn the platform into a bloated, overcomplicated mess.. exactly the kind of thing I was happy to get away from when I left proprietary operating systems behind two decades ago.
    - throwawaysysd 5y ago
      I don't understand what you mean by a few people get to define it. This stuff is used by basically every desktop environment on Linux. You have to either use it or write something very similar to it if you want to have permission prompts that actually work. They all give the option to turn it off but they still have to support it for the average user you described. Unsurprisingly, the requirements for shipping a desktop are really not that different on Linux compared to other operating systems. The users all want the same things. From what I have seen, the amount of users that want to go back to the Windows 95 style of security are an even fewer people. You can find distros that still ship a desktop from that era but they don't seem to be for much beyond novelty.
      - foxfluff 5y ago
        > The users all want the same things. Please don't speak for everyone. It's exactly this patronizing we-know-better-than-you attitude that makes users hate their corporate software vendors. > From what I have seen, the amount of users that want to go back to the Windows 95 style of security are an even fewer people. I knew someone would immediately reply with this straw man as soon as they saw mention of old Windows. I said user policies are pointless for a single-user desktop. It's irrelevant whether dave and samantha can access the audio device in john's session because dave and samantha don't exist on john's personal computer and he sure ain't running an ssh daemon for them.

throwaway984393 5y ago

What sysadmin are desktop users having to ask for permission to use their own hardware? Even in 2001, if you had a laptop, you had access to use all it's hardware. Why wouldn't you? How many groups do you think there are? There's only so many classes of hardware, so there's only so many groups. About 8 in total. You add the user to all of them at once. It worked just fine before polkit arrived. Why would you want to temporarily grant privileges to hardware once? Who is trying to prevent the user from using their own hardware? What's the very good reason all desktops use it?

throwawaysysd 5y ago
I detailed this in another comment, the reason desktops use it is to get those macOS-style permission dialogs that pop up when you try to take some privileged action. I don't think any desktop distribution wants to ask users to open a terminal and type "sudo usermod" and then log out and log back in in order to do something like setting the clock or formatting a usb drive. I don't remember this working well at all before polkit arrived either, I remember when device hotplug in Linux was really broken for this reason (and a few others). It's not reasonable to ask desktop users to edit udev rules when plugging in a new device. If it worked well at all it was because you were doing things like having a lot of suid/sgid tools or just running GUI programs as root which is a terrible idea. >Who is trying to prevent the user from using their own hardware? I don't understand this question. The functionality here is equivalent to sudo, you type your password to authenticate a certain action. As the sysadmin you can configure some actions to always accept or always deny, if you want.
- michaelmrose 5y ago
  > As the sysadmin you can configure some actions to always accept or always deny, if you want You can do this with sudo too.
  - throwawaysysd 5y ago
    Yes, polkit does have some overlap with sudo. What it has over sudo is a real API, programs can use it to authenticate an IPC request for an action to a privileged daemon while that daemon is running.

michaelmrose 5y ago

Even though the situation described is strange to the point of having never happened in history you would still need to ask an admin to write policy to implement your interesting audio permission scheme just the same as one would need to ask an admin to add a group or you know automate the process with a gui or integrate the change in groups into updating or software installation. I am sure that somewhere having an actual programming language available vs list of what can and can't be run with or without a password would enable some additional power in terms of control of the system but I cannot for the life of me imagine a situation where it would be all that useful.

throwawaysysd 5y ago
I agree it's not particularly useful for home users, I expect most would go with the defaults provided by their distro and leave it there. This is meant for corporate deployments where sysadmins might need to write more advanced policies.