I ran "poweroff" as a regular user -- and the system shut down.
The reason is polkit. By default, on a freshly installed system, it
allows any user to initiate a system shutdown. Maybe more, I don't
know and I haven't checked.
The end is near. I no longer feel like I'm in control of this system.
It no longer feels like the system does nothing by default, unless you
tell it otherwise.
The same goes for this new trend of auto-activating daemons. What the
shit? If I want a daemon running, I enable it.
I now maintain a list of stuff to disable on my systems:
gopher://uninformativ.de/0/txt/gnu-linux-notes/arch-disable-annoying-daemons.md
Funny enough, everything I do still works after disabling polkit,
rtkit, colord and avahi. There is no fundamental need for these
daemons, they just might be useful in some situations for some people.
This is a disaster. Stuff like that is the reason why I left Windows
many years ago. It's the reason why I chose Arch Linux, which used to
do nothing unless you told it to.
So annoying. Linux, the kernel, has many useful features and great
hardware support. I don't want to miss that by switching to one of the
BSDs. But with all that freedesktop.org fuckery going on, it's getting
harder every day to maintain a more or less non-sucking system ...
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Just to clarify: Simply disabling these daemons is not the solution.
It's a hack and it's prone to cause problems.