Here’s the crux of the issue: I don’t even know where to start looking. I’ve googled this issue, and found all sorts of answers pointing to polkit, or dbus, or

Here’s the crux of the issue: I don’t even know where to start looking. I’ve googled this issue, and found all sorts of answers pointing to polkit, or dbus, or systemd-shim, or cgmanager, or lightdm, or XFCE, or… I found a bug report of this exact problem — Debian #760281, but it’s marked fixed, and nobody replied to my comment that I’m still seeing it. If this is the crux for the OP I don't really see how this is for Modern Linux. Maybe it's just me (though I doubt it) but what is described here is basically how working with linux (and software in general to a lesser extent) has been for me as long as I've used it. Small annoying problems here and there which take quite some amount of time to find a fix for, if any. And after a while if there are too many of them it becomes irritating and you start a blog post to nag about it :]