On running gui applications as root

[Tom Hughes]

On 17/11/15 18:11, Andrew Haley wrote:
> On 11/17/2015 05:55 PM, Joonas Sarajärvi wrote:
>> My impression is that by default in fedora, virt-manager runs as
>> non-root. I guess it might ask for the root password in order to
>> manage the libvirtd that runs as privileged mode, but even in that
>> case the user interface would run as your normal user.
>
> Sure, but even that is a UI regression: applications which ask for
> the root password discourage long root passwords and train people
> to type the root password whenever it's asked for.  I should not
> even need to know the root password.

Well you'll be pleased to know then that virt-manager doesn't normally 
ask for the root password. If you're in the libvirt group then I don't 
think it will ask at all, otherwise if you're an administrative user 
then it will ask for your password.

If you weren't an admin user then it might ask for the root password but 
I don't think I've ever tried that. It does whatever polkit does for 
auth_admin basically.

Certainly there is no good reason to run virt-manager as root.

Tom

-- 
Tom Hughes (tom at compton.nu)
http://compton.nu/