Comment 24 for bug 1008344

philw85: I completely agree. The time settings dialog is a great example for how this should work.

I think it's also fine to just let PolicyKit prompt when it needs to without telling the user beforehand. Average Ubuntu users are going to be admins on their single-user systems, and where users are not admins on their own machines it will still be clear what the problem is.

Dialogs that connect to services that use PolicyKit don't need to be aware PolicyKit exists, and keeping those dialogs unaware of PolicyKit makes them flexible for more exotic configurations. There are so many in-the-middle configurations where the user is almost an admin, but can't do absolutely everything. Maybe the user is configured to be able to change time/language settings and install trusted packages, but isn't allowed to install untrusted packages. My point is that the question "is the user an admin?" is very ambiguous, so it's better to just not ask and let PolicyKit handle it.