Shutdown allowed after user switch

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hans_k

Shutdown allowed after user switch

Post by hans_k »

Dear all,

after years of working with Debian I installed Mint/Mate because of some new hardware that would not run with even with the latest Debian 8.2. Mint is a great distribution, (almost) everything works out of the box so far!

However, one thing that irritates me is that after switching to a second user from Mate, the second user is allowed to shutdown the system, although the first user is still logged in. So far I used an older Debian system with Gnome-Classic and on that system the second user was not allowed to kick out the first one. IIRC a window appeared asking for SU privileges to really perform the shutdown.

So, my question is: Is there any switch in the mdm-configuration to disallow the shutdown in case of some other user still being logged in? If that is not the case, is it a question of the display manager such that using the gnome display manager would help? Does anybody know how the problem is handled on a Debian system?
Last edited by LockBot on Wed Dec 28, 2022 7:16 am, edited 1 time in total.
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hans_k

Re: Shutdown allowed after user switch

Post by hans_k »

Dear all, I am a bit astonished not to receive any reply. No objection, it seems to be more complex than I thought. However, for me it is hard to understand, why Mate is not able to prohibit kicking out a user without warning. Even more irritating, that this functionality was available on all my old Debian Gnome 2 based installations. Has this feature been lost in Mate?

Meanwhile, I experimented with polkit, but I was not successful. I also installed gdm instead of mdm, but the behavior was still the same. Finally, I installed Cinnamon and that solved the problem: The second user after the user switch cannot shutdown the system while the first user is still logged in. Instead of shutting down the system, the second user is only logged out and the login screen for the first user appears.

Even if you do not have a solution for the problem, could you please post a feedback, if you also think that the described behavior of Mate is an issue that should be fixed? I think Mate is very nice and a very good alternative to other Dektop Environments. But as long as this problem is not fixed I have to choose some other platform. And that is a pity.
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austin.texas
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Re: Shutdown allowed after user switch

Post by austin.texas »

hans_k wrote:Even if you do not have a solution for the problem, could you please post a feedback, if you also think that the described behavior of Mate is an issue that should be fixed?
I have never used Mate extensively, only Cinnamon, so I am not familiar with the problem you describe. It does sound like something that is unacceptable.
I agree that overall Mate is a fine Desktop.

I installed 17.2 Mate on an empty partition, created a new user, logged in as that user, and the behavior is as you detailed. That user shut the computer down without recognizing that the administrative user was still logged in.
Mint 18.2 Cinnamon, Quad core AMD A8-3870 with Radeon HD Graphics 6550D, 8GB DDR3, Ralink RT2561/RT61 802.11g PCI
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austin.texas
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Re: Shutdown allowed after user switch

Post by austin.texas »

Mint 18.2 Cinnamon, Quad core AMD A8-3870 with Radeon HD Graphics 6550D, 8GB DDR3, Ralink RT2561/RT61 802.11g PCI
Linux Linx 2018
hans_k

Re: Shutdown allowed after user switch

Post by hans_k »

Thanks for your replies that confirm the described behaviour.

When I wrote that I experimented with polkit I meant exactly what you posted. Unfortunately, it did not work. I guess the reason for that is that mdm or some other task already runs with root permission. At least mdm runs as root as I found out by looking at the task list. If I am wrong with that explanation and there are some other ideas any hint is welcome!
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