Monthly Archives: December 2012

The breakage of permissions under recent PolKit/logind is flabbergasting. They have completely subverted UNIX groups/permissions in a difficult-to-unbreak way. And I get cheerful little update messages saying things like “You no longer need to be in the camera group to use cameras” like it’s a fucking feature (and they’re lying; they mean users logged in locally no longer need to be in the camera group – remote users still need it). If I want a user to have access to some hardware on a machine, I’ll give it permissions. If I don’t, I probably don’t for a reason. Let’s talk use cases: perhaps you would like to hide the camera from a kid’s user. Or you would like to check on something with the camera attached to your remote machine. Or work a music player via SSH. Or generally use the resources on the machine you bothered to log into remotely because why the fuck else would you have logged in there? Every one of those is now more complicated to accomplish. Adding a facility to enable/disable permissions for remote or local users might be reasonable, but just fucking breaking groups for a couple use cases no one uses is moronic. (Seriously, Fast User Switching keeps coming up as a rationale for breaking things. Has anyone, ever used fast user switching on one of the platforms that supports it? There are usually more computer-like-devices than people in a household now, it isn’t relevant.)

Can someone please come up with a straightforward way to just noop all the PolKit bullshit so I can have my UNIX box back from the FreeDesktop assholes?