8 ms·

Policykit's sole purpose is to provide an abstraction to let modern X server applications press a suspend or power off button. It's the same kind of garbage as

Policykit's sole purpose is to provide an abstraction to let modern X server applications press a suspend or power off button. It's the same kind of garbage as DBus. The modern Linux desktop is absurd.

skeptical1 5y ago
Yes, this is exactly why I don't run any of this crap on my distro. No dbus, no polkit, no systemd, nothing. Computer security is already enough of a nightmare without all this crap added on and linked in to everything.
- 400thecat 5y ago
  I also have my system without polkit and without systemd. But how do you get rid of dbus? It seems to be needed for many GUI applications
  - skeptical1 5y ago
    Some programs can be configured to run without it. Others require patching to remove it. Some patches are trivial, others not so much. I've done a lot of patching, with still more required to get other applications running that I want to use. At some point I'm planning to build a "dummy" dbus library that can be linked against but actually does nothing at all, but I haven't gotten around to it yet.
- crazy_hombre 5y ago
  Oh no, an application has bugs. Must get rid of it!
  - skeptical1 5y ago
    Has bugs, is way too complex for the given functionality, and is completely unneeded in the first place--yes, get rid of the damn thing. Unless of course you enjoy getting "your" system OWNED and dominated by bad actors. My custom distro beats the brakes off junkware like Ubuntu and (lol) Windows in startup time and responsiveness, and has all of the functionality I need, with half the code and as a result much fewer gaping security holes. Computer security is an absolute nightmare these days. Intelligent people should be simplifying things and stripping everything down to the bare minimum, instead of stacking more crud on top of endless crud. Those who fail to SECURE their systems and workflows will one day in the near future be surprised as shit to find that the entire "cloud" has been hacked and destroyed by worms and their system trashed right along with it. At that time, the world will be divided into two camps: computer owners (me and my kind) and non computer owners (everyone else.)
    - palmetieri2000 5y ago
      Regardless of how genius your distro is this reeks of self importance and arrogance to an almost satirical level.
      - skeptical1 5y ago
        Who cares? If you don't take computer security seriously, you won't be computing much longer. Before it's over with, mine will be the only opinion still in existence. It's called "natural selection."
    - chaxor 5y ago
      You don't have Firefox or any browser? How are you posting? W3m? I would imagine that these have an enormous amount of bugs and security issues if parts of basic Linux programs are riddled enough with them by your standards.
      - skeptical1 5y ago
        You seem to have expertly missed the point.
    - throwawaysysd 5y ago
      >is way too complex for the given functionality, and is completely unneeded in the first place--yes, get rid of the damn thing. Unless of course you enjoy getting "your" system OWNED and dominated by bad actors. This is a rather nonsense statement. Polkit (or something like it) is needed if you want to have those macOS-style "program A wants to have permission to access privileged resource B" security prompts in the GUI. It's about as complicated as any similar solution needs to be for that use case. Perhaps you find these to be annoying and you disable them so they always succeed, but with that you've effectively given every program permanent suid root access. Definitely simpler, but can you say it's less of a security nightmare? I wouldn't. Yes there are risks of vulnerabilities in any security layer, but without them you've got no security layer at all.
      - 5y ago
  - foxfluff 5y ago
    That's worked pretty well e.g. for OpenBSD. Their code isn't perfect, but they've evaded lots of bullets simply by removing things they don't deem necessary. I think I've evaded many bullets exactly the same way. More code and more complexity -> more bugs, more holes. It's pretty simple.
- emptybottle 5y ago
  Me too, the only process I run is init. I don’t even mount a root filesystem. Can’t root without a root is what I always say! /s
foxfluff 5y ago
Why does pipewire depend on it? Otherwise I'd just remove it right now.
- throwaway984393 5y ago
  Sigh... Because systemd, dbus, polkit, pulseaudio, rtkit, etc are invasive weeds. Apps now depend on them exclusively so often that you have to provide some shim to replace their ABI if you don't want to use those components. I can't remember the specifics but pipewire probably only casually references it as part of a compatibility layer. In Alpine I'm pretty sure you can run pipewire without polkit but I'd have to check.
  - throwawaysysd 5y ago
    Or it could be because those libraries actually do something and users want them? I really don't get these complaints. Is the C library an "invasive weed" because C programs require an ABI compatible C library to run?
    - foxfluff 5y ago
      They are invasive if they somehow end up on your system even if you don't need them and didn't ask for it. The C library is something that I actually need, unlike a GUI sudo prompt for.. audio? I don't even know what such a prompt looks like because I've never seen one.
      - throwawaysysd 5y ago
        I'm sorry, now I really don't understand. If these libraries shipped with your distro, you asked for them. If they were dependencies of a package you installed, you asked for them. It's bizarre to me that there are hundreds of Linux distros with every combination of packages you could possibly ask for and I still see this complaints. It's very likely you didn't see a prompt because your distro configured it to not require a password. If you want to configure it to require a password, the system lets you do that. This is just another choice you have.
ismaildonmez 5y ago
Confidently incorrect.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

skeptical1 5y ago

Yes, this is exactly why I don't run any of this crap on my distro. No dbus, no polkit, no systemd, nothing. Computer security is already enough of a nightmare without all this crap added on and linked in to everything.

400thecat 5y ago
I also have my system without polkit and without systemd. But how do you get rid of dbus? It seems to be needed for many GUI applications
- skeptical1 5y ago
  Some programs can be configured to run without it. Others require patching to remove it. Some patches are trivial, others not so much. I've done a lot of patching, with still more required to get other applications running that I want to use. At some point I'm planning to build a "dummy" dbus library that can be linked against but actually does nothing at all, but I haven't gotten around to it yet.
crazy_hombre 5y ago
Oh no, an application has bugs. Must get rid of it!
- skeptical1 5y ago
  Has bugs, is way too complex for the given functionality, and is completely unneeded in the first place--yes, get rid of the damn thing. Unless of course you enjoy getting "your" system OWNED and dominated by bad actors. My custom distro beats the brakes off junkware like Ubuntu and (lol) Windows in startup time and responsiveness, and has all of the functionality I need, with half the code and as a result much fewer gaping security holes. Computer security is an absolute nightmare these days. Intelligent people should be simplifying things and stripping everything down to the bare minimum, instead of stacking more crud on top of endless crud. Those who fail to SECURE their systems and workflows will one day in the near future be surprised as shit to find that the entire "cloud" has been hacked and destroyed by worms and their system trashed right along with it. At that time, the world will be divided into two camps: computer owners (me and my kind) and non computer owners (everyone else.)
  - palmetieri2000 5y ago
    Regardless of how genius your distro is this reeks of self importance and arrogance to an almost satirical level.
    - skeptical1 5y ago
      Who cares? If you don't take computer security seriously, you won't be computing much longer. Before it's over with, mine will be the only opinion still in existence. It's called "natural selection."
  - chaxor 5y ago
    You don't have Firefox or any browser? How are you posting? W3m? I would imagine that these have an enormous amount of bugs and security issues if parts of basic Linux programs are riddled enough with them by your standards.
    - skeptical1 5y ago
      You seem to have expertly missed the point.
  - throwawaysysd 5y ago
    >is way too complex for the given functionality, and is completely unneeded in the first place--yes, get rid of the damn thing. Unless of course you enjoy getting "your" system OWNED and dominated by bad actors. This is a rather nonsense statement. Polkit (or something like it) is needed if you want to have those macOS-style "program A wants to have permission to access privileged resource B" security prompts in the GUI. It's about as complicated as any similar solution needs to be for that use case. Perhaps you find these to be annoying and you disable them so they always succeed, but with that you've effectively given every program permanent suid root access. Definitely simpler, but can you say it's less of a security nightmare? I wouldn't. Yes there are risks of vulnerabilities in any security layer, but without them you've got no security layer at all.
    - 5y ago
- foxfluff 5y ago
  That's worked pretty well e.g. for OpenBSD. Their code isn't perfect, but they've evaded lots of bullets simply by removing things they don't deem necessary. I think I've evaded many bullets exactly the same way. More code and more complexity -> more bugs, more holes. It's pretty simple.
emptybottle 5y ago
Me too, the only process I run is init. I don’t even mount a root filesystem. Can’t root without a root is what I always say! /s

foxfluff 5y ago

Why does pipewire depend on it? Otherwise I'd just remove it right now.

throwaway984393 5y ago
Sigh... Because systemd, dbus, polkit, pulseaudio, rtkit, etc are invasive weeds. Apps now depend on them exclusively so often that you have to provide some shim to replace their ABI if you don't want to use those components. I can't remember the specifics but pipewire probably only casually references it as part of a compatibility layer. In Alpine I'm pretty sure you can run pipewire without polkit but I'd have to check.
- throwawaysysd 5y ago
  Or it could be because those libraries actually do something and users want them? I really don't get these complaints. Is the C library an "invasive weed" because C programs require an ABI compatible C library to run?
  - foxfluff 5y ago
    They are invasive if they somehow end up on your system even if you don't need them and didn't ask for it. The C library is something that I actually need, unlike a GUI sudo prompt for.. audio? I don't even know what such a prompt looks like because I've never seen one.
    - throwawaysysd 5y ago
      I'm sorry, now I really don't understand. If these libraries shipped with your distro, you asked for them. If they were dependencies of a package you installed, you asked for them. It's bizarre to me that there are hundreds of Linux distros with every combination of packages you could possibly ask for and I still see this complaints. It's very likely you didn't see a prompt because your distro configured it to not require a password. If you want to configure it to require a password, the system lets you do that. This is just another choice you have.

ismaildonmez 5y ago

Confidently incorrect.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]