GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 598770
Text in dialog is slightly complex
Last modified: 2019-02-23 02:45:00 UTC
Created attachment 145666 [details] screenshot of dialog in Software Center I was just about to install some new software the other day and ran across the policykit dialog. Instead of just entering my password blindly, I tried to figure out what it actually said, and found it slightly complex. I wonder if we can clean up the language used here to repeat itself less (Authenticate is mentioned 4 times, required 3). This could aid people to get what is going on, as right now I feel myself going into "I don't get what it says, but apparently I need to enter a password to get rid of it".
Current text says: "An application is attempting to perform an action that requires privileges. Authentication is required to perform this action. Password:" I'd recommend making it shorter and simpler: "This application requires administrative privileges. If you wish to continue, please enter administrator password:". I'm hoping the "If you" helps the user understand that continuing is not mandatory, but if they wish to do whatever PolicyKit is prompting them to do they'll need to enter their password.
More feedback after bouncing this off Shaun McCance. <title>Authentication Required</title> This application wants to install software packages. If you wish to continue, enter your password." We aren't sure if this is the root / administrator password or not - I'm assuming it is because it's installing packages. If it is, use: <title>Authentication Required</title> This application wants to install software packages. If you wish to continue, enter your administrator password." (With different distros having root passwords or not).
Here is a mockup of what I think the dialog should look like. http://and471.deviantart.com/art/PolicyKit-Dialog-Re-Design-258973264 I have simplified the text to a lot more manageable size. The primary text of the dialog is the action to be performed, and then the secondary text explains why this dialog has appeared. This reduces repetition of authentication A LOT and is not as off putting to the user. I have also remove the Window title and controls as is standard for modal dialogs according to GNOME HIG I have removed the Password: label and instead added placeholder text for the entry. This allows us to make the action more clear : Enter YOUR password not root's etc. Finally I made the details a bit less technical looking (i.e. 'Subject PID' compared to 'polkit.subject-pid') and made it regular sized text. I believe not only does this make it better looking, but having it so small is a security risk as a malicious PolicyKit action could name itself similiar to a harmless one, and because of the small size which makes the text harder to read, a user could not see the difference.
Thanks for the effort, but not sure why it's worth spending any effort on this as it's only used in fallback mode - GNOME 3 uses the dialog provided by the Shell, see http://davidz25.blogspot.com/2011/02/gnome-3-authorization.html Ideally fallback mode would just go away and then PolicyKit-gnome can go away entirely with the confusion that it causes.
I appreciate this, however there will be people who don't use GNOME Shell, or even entire distributions (i.e. Ubuntu which I use)
(In reply to comment #5) > I appreciate this, however there will be people who don't use GNOME Shell, or > even entire distributions (i.e. Ubuntu which I use) Honestly, non-GNOME desktops (such as Unity or XFCE) are much better off writing their own authentication agent - you really want something that hooks into the desktop compositor, presents the dialog in a system-modal way and looks native to the environment (just like GNOME Shell does cf. the link in comment 4). It's not a lot of work to write your own authentication agent thanks to the libpolkit-agent-1.so library - it's even available through GObject Introspection.
Ok I may look into that, thanks very much :)
policykit-gnome is not under active development anymore. Its codebase has been archived: https://gitlab.gnome.org/Archive/policykit-gnome/commits/master Closing this report as WONTFIX as part of Bugzilla Housekeeping to reflect reality. Please feel free to reopen this ticket (or rather reactivate the project to GNOME Gitlab, as GNOME Bugzilla is deprecated) if anyone takes the responsibility for active development again.