I am using mc instead of Dolphin and Kate if I have to use a filemanager or editor with root privileges. "sudo mc" works perfectly.

This is truly an astounding development, the idea that I need to be "protected" by a KDE developer is the epitome of irony and utterly contradicts the nature of "free and open source". I will certainly not use or support this desktop ever again and I doubt that you can "protect me" from reformatting my hard drive and abandoning KDE and Kubuntu forever.

I'm not that desperate that I feel the need to abandon KDE... at least not yet!
My workaround was to install Krusader
Under the Tools menu there is an option to start as ROOT
Does what I need it to do without fuss!

MajikSunshine wrote:This is truly an astounding development, the idea that I need to be "protected" by a KDE developer is the epitome of irony and utterly contradicts the nature of "free and open source". I will certainly not use or support this desktop ever again and I doubt that you can "protect me" from reformatting my hard drive and abandoning KDE and Kubuntu forever.

I registered just to reply to this topic and to say I completely agree with this comment, what a dumb decision.

First of all - it is my choice as a user whether I want to run these apps in a safe or not safe way, you can integrate some big red warning sign if you want or make this an option in Dolphin settings somewhere, but preventing (cutting off really) users from doing whatever they want to be doing to their own files in a simple and quick GUI way is truly astoundingly stupid, very much annoying and also impedes on my GNU/Linux freedom.

Secondly - besides maybe doing this transition in a smart way - why do this now? Why couldn't this "feature" be implemented AFTER Polkit is fully developed/integrated/working?

And to conclude - while it won't prevent me from using KDE, it might, very possibly, draw at least some less tech-savvy users away from using an otherwise awesome DE, or at the very least result in their (and mine) lost productivity, because in a safe or not a safe way some users (like me) do want to be able to edit/move/copy files with GUI tools, which is way faster, especially for those people who do not live in the terminal.

In my humble <<but I hope loud>> opinion - this was a VERY MUCH stupid decision from user side of things.

abury wrote:I'm not that desperate that I feel the need to abandon KDE... at least not yet!
My workaround was to install Krusader
Under the Tools menu there is an option to start as ROOT
Does what I need it to do without fuss!

Thank you very much for this workaround, it also pretty much proves that everything I wrote above is true.

Why would "less tech savvy" users be messing about in the root folders? If you're tech savvy enough to be doing that, you're tech savvy enough to understand why opening a GUI program is not a good idea when told. Wayland doesn't allow for GUI apps to be opened as root so when your distro switches to that (some already have options to use it), you won't be able to use ANY app in most distros like that. This is why it has been changed.

Clancularius wrote:Why would "less tech savvy" users be messing about in the root folders? If you're tech savvy enough to be doing that, you're tech savvy enough to understand why opening a GUI program is not a good idea when told. Wayland doesn't allow for GUI apps to be opened as root so when your distro switches to that (some already have options to use it), you won't be able to use ANY app in most distros like that. This is why it has been changed.

To give some background - I mostly play an admin role when it comes to Linux systems and for work this does makes some sense, but I ran into this issue on my own computer after installing openSUSE Leap 15 beta when I needed to transfer files between different partitions and Dolphin told me I cannot do it. Sure - I can do things through terminal, but as a hypothetical scenario - if I was to install a KDE system for a friend and if that friend wanted to do some file transfers between their old and a new system - that would be a bit of a problem, no way to elvete anything through GUI, not a very user friendly system. Couldn't this be an optional feature? Even if system-wide?

To me this decision contradicts the free (as in freedom) principle for which the GPL lisence itself was created and in my opinion this desision boarders on sabotage of these principles. It is not responsibility of developer to control what user does, that's what admins are for. If user should not have privilidges to do certain things it is a job of an admin to limit those privilidges and it is developer's job to give admin the tools to limit those privilidges, so maybe a particular user should not have root credentials and maybe OS policies (Polkit?) should limit user/admin to doing only certain things with root privilidges when needed. I looks to me that here developers are trying to play a role of administrators in trying to tell both admins and users (both really users in this case) what they should or should not be doing with their own systems, restricting them in the GUI freedom so to speak, and for no real good reason. As the above comments show the users will still find alternative GUI tools to do what they need to do, so why do this in the first place or at least why do it now? I just fail to see the necessity and urgency with this implementation with no simple native GUI alternatives being provided to users.

You will be able to do root things in Dolphin when they introduce the polkit mentioned earlier in the thread. It is just being changed so that instead of opening the program as root, that you enter a password whenever you need to do an action as root. The end result is that you will be able to do those things in a way that doesn't have the negative effects of opening a GUI app as root. Wayland is being introduced before this polkit has been rolled out, that's why there has been the problem. Nobody is trying to sabotage anyone's freedom.

As sombreroz says, give midnight commander a go, it's an excellent application and terminal based so you can run it as sudo no problem.

mayic wrote:Secondly - besides maybe doing this transition in a smart way - why do this now? Why couldn't this "feature" be implemented AFTER Polkit is fully developed/integrated/working?

This here is really the crux of the issue: they took away functionality before the replacement was really ready.

I've yet to hear a complaint that won't be satisfied once they have all of the Polkit stuff integrated so that the user using their gui tools (running as the user rather than root) can do admin stuff when they need to (even allowing admins to customize the Polkit rules to grant/deny various actions to their users, including granting yourself free rein on your machine).
In the end this will end up enabling users to do more with their gui tools (in a more secure fashion) rather than needing to resort to cli tools or running insecure gui tools as root to do admin stuff.
They just handled the transition poorly, leaving (power) users hanging.

I will not move to KUbuntu 18.04 until this problem be solved, Will it go on take a long time ??

Phabricator: Implement a more user-friendly run-as-root-or-sudo behavior - https://phabricator.kde.org/D12732

Rog131 wrote:Phabricator: Implement a more user-friendly run-as-root-or-sudo behavior - https://phabricator.kde.org/D12732

+1
Thank you!

Another: Re-allow running Dolphin as the root user (but still not using sudo) - https://phabricator.kde.org/D12795


With the Neon in the VBox - KDE Apps 18.08

With the help of:

- pkexec: https://www.freedesktop.org/software/polkit/docs/0.105/pkexec.1.html

- “error: XDG_RUNTIME_DIR not set in the environment.” when attempting to run nautilus as root: https://askubuntu.com/questions/456689/error-xdg-runtime-dir-not-set-in-the-environment-when-attempting-to-run-naut

- Krusader 2.5.0 missing toolbar icons in root mode: https://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=309&t=136927

command =>

Code: Select all

pkexec env DISPLAY=$DISPLAY XAUTHORITY=$XAUTHORITY KDE_SESSION_VERSION=5 KDE_FULL_SESSION=true dolphin

Seem to work...



Gif: https://i.imgur.com/oHNf45t.gif

The polkit dudes actually had the nerves to write:

simply write an action definition file like this <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> ... following tons of gobbledigook

but on https://www.freedesktop.org/software/polkit/docs/latest/pkexec.1.html that bs verbiage from https://www.freedesktop.org/software/polkit/docs/0.105/pkexec.1.html was removed by David Zeuthen , davidz@redhat.com

It shows , though, how people who make your desktop unmanagable with their darn root / password stuff act as if they were such an ingenue.

Where is the ultimate guide to have things as simple as they were in earlier versions of KDE ?

The polkit dudes have the gall to claim that polkit makes things "simple" , but now that they dropped that line, they are not straight enough to say that polkit is extremely difficult to handle.

I saw tons of posts complaining about it , such as this: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=152150#c12

and https://phabricator.kde.org/D12795#371044