Arch Linux

Xiaoming94

Member

Registered: 2014-10-13

Posts: 6

[SOLVED] Flatpak doesn't prompt for password without --user flag

Hello. I'm not sure whether this is a newbie question or not.

I've recently started to use flatpak to avoid dependency hell for some applications.
Reading the wiki, and using flatpak in other places - it should prompt me for a password whenever I'm installing something without the "--user" flag.

But on my own arch laptop and desktop PC, I've noticed that this is not the case.
I don't remember doing anything remarkable really, just installed the flatpak package with

# pacman -S flatpak 

And started using it. Things just sortof - installs...

I'm wondering about how this can happen?
Also, is my setup at any form of security risk keeping things this way despite me being the only user?

Last edited by Xiaoming94 (2025-04-12 17:44:48)

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 25,157

Re: [SOLVED] Flatpak doesn't prompt for password without --user flag

if the pacman cmdline is any indication --- you're not running this form a root shell right? Otherwise could also be that flatpak implies --user if not invoked as a priviledged user. But I don't use flatpaks so that's most suggestion I can give on a whim.

Xiaoming94

Member

Registered: 2014-10-13

Posts: 6

Re: [SOLVED] Flatpak doesn't prompt for password without --user flag

if the pacman cmdline is any indication --- you're not running this form a root shell right? Otherwise could also be that flatpak implies --user if not invoked as a priviledged user. But I don't use flatpaks so that's most suggestion I can give on a whim.

Hello! I'm not running flatpak as a privileged / root user. I just used the "#" because I didn't feel like writing

 $ sudo pacman -S flatpak 

.

I was just posting this forum thread because I couldn't find anything in the flatpak Arch-wiki page didn't say anything
Not sure how important it is, but my user is part of these groups:

users wheel video gamemode

Could it be that I'm part of the wheel group maybe?

Xiaoming94

Member

Registered: 2014-10-13

Posts: 6

Re: [SOLVED] Flatpak doesn't prompt for password without --user flag

Actually, managed to solve this issue on my own.

When reading up on the differences between the groups sudo and wheel, I stumbled upon this description on the Users and groups page

Administration group, commonly used to give privileges to perform administrative actions.
It has full read access to journal files and the right to administer printers in CUPS.
Can also be used to give access to the sudo and su utilities (neither uses it by default).

This prompted me to look into the interactions between the wheel group and flatpak and I found this issue on github.
According to the conversation on the issue, it appears that flatpak views members of the wheel group as sysadmins, as thus, it will not prompt for password when installing flatpaks system-wide.

Perhaps this information can be added to the Archwiki page on Flatpak as an improvement?

Last edited by Xiaoming94 (2025-04-12 17:43:54)

mackin_cheese

Member

Registered: 2025-01-07

Posts: 477

Re: [SOLVED] Flatpak doesn't prompt for password without --user flag

Perhaps this information can be added to the Archwiki page on Flatpak as an improvement? smile

That's the neat part of being a Arch user. You can submit this as a contribution to the wiki page itself! no need to wait for others