On 07/20/2017 05:39 PM, Fungi4All wrote: > Apart from what different wm/dm do, should a user without sudo > priviledges be able to stop or restart a system? > In most wm I have seen the user is able to do this without being > asked for root priviledges and I believe this is wrong and should > not be done.
As far as I know, this is done by policykit (policykit-1 in the repos). Among other things, it allows users that are logged in locally to shutdown/reboot the system, unless there are other users logged in. Pretty sure it's possible to override this if you don't want this to happen. > As I see contradictory reading material on the issue from the > point of view of a single user personal system to an enterprise > system, why would any desktop come with this activated as > default and not be the other way around but with a simple option > for root to change/activate this ability. If the user has physical access to the machine, there isn't really a point to stopping them from shutting the system down, really. I can't really think of instances where this could be a security issue, and it can be overridden if you don't want it. Also, for users coming from other OSes, it may be odd that they are unable to shut down their system without being an administrator, and it wouldn't allow shared laptops/computers.
