Comment 14 for bug 1008344

> Nobody sat down and designed the current behavior.

Well, checking "admin" group membership long predates the advent of polkit. admin group members are still _the_ fundamental definition of an administrator in Ubuntu; sudo, polkit, etc. all define their privileges based on that in their default configuration.

So if you created a new group that are admins in the sense of "root", but is not called "admin", nothing on the desktop will recognize this at first. This includes language selector, but also things like which .desktop files are presented in the desktop and which aren't, then sudo, and a couple of other places which check group memberships. (You already updated your polkit configuration etc. of course, but that's not sufficient for everything).

That said, if someone wants to change language-selector to query polkit for com.ubuntu.languageselector.setsystemdefaultlanguage instead of checking the group membership , that would be very welcome. It's one of the few remaining places which still directly uses the groups.