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Comment by qznc | Hacker News Reader

I think it is a old-timer issue. I'm using Linux on my desktop for ca 15 years. I also had a mysterious permission problem after my last Ubuntu upgrade. In contrast, to 10 years ago, I do not like hours of debugging to get USB working anymore. It was fascinating then.

For the record, my permission problem was solved via "sudo pam-auth-update --force". Thanks Arch Wiki for giving me the crucial hint.

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I agree wholeheartedly on the old-timer issue (ca 17 years). Too much work, children and other responsibilities to justify hacking hours on the OS itself. I think the current state of Linux – especially on the desktop – is in a state of flux, not to call it disarray, and it makes me grumpy that after all these years of hacking, debugging, patching and bug reporting, things end up pretty usable, and then "they" manage to break some of the most basic functionality again. Only this time, it's gotten a lot harder to make sense of the whole mess...

So, why not use a distribution that doesn't change every six months or two years? Such as Ubuntu LTS or CentOS.

I am having a similar problem (password sometimes required to shutdown or mount disks) with my latest Ubuntu, so I would appreciate a little more detail.

Do you happen to have a link to the arch wiki entry you are mentioning? What was exactly your problem?

I had problems with shutdown, hibernation, USB sticks, wifi notifications. Here is a very similar launchpad bug report:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/pam/+bug/1317518

As in the bug report, the problem was not replicable. While my Thinkpad had these issues, my desktop was fine.

Unfortunately, my notes say nothing about the Arch wiki. Maybe I confused that with another issue.

Ok, thank you for the information. I will try to work from here :-)

I've been using linux for about as long as you, I still enjoy spending time trying to figure out why things broke about as much as I did back then (which means not much).

My impression is that figuring things out is getting a lot harder, the big mess of D-Bus, GNOME, NetworkManager, anything ending in Kit and systemd is not only in a constant state of flux but their internals are also poorly documented (or not documented at all).

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