I thought I’ll make this thread for all of you out there who have questions but are afraid to ask them. This is your chance!
I’ll try my best to answer any questions here, but I hope others in the community will contribute too!
I thought I’ll make this thread for all of you out there who have questions but are afraid to ask them. This is your chance!
I’ll try my best to answer any questions here, but I hope others in the community will contribute too!
Is there a way to remove having to enter my password for everything?
Wake computer from Screensaver? Password.
Install something? Password.
Updates (biggest one. Updates should in my opinion just work without, because being up to date is important for security reasons)? Password.
I understand sudo needs a password,but all the other stuff I just want off. The frequency is rediculous. I don’t ever leave my house with my computer, and I don’t want to enter a password for my wife everytime she wants to use it.
You can configure sudo to not need a password for certain commands. Unfortunately the syntax and documentation for that is not easily readable. Doas which can be installed and used along side sudo is easier.
For software updates you can go for unattended-upgrades though if you turn off your computer when it is upgrading software you may have to fix the broken pieces.
I’ve tried unattended-upgrades once. And I couldn’t get it to work back then. It might be more user friendly now. Or it could just be me.
It’s not really user friendly, at least not how I know it. But useful for servers and when desktop computers are on for a long time. It would be a matter of enabling or disabling it with :
sudo dpkg-reconfigure unattended-upgradesgranted that you have the unattended-upgrades package installed. In that case I’m not sure when the background updates will start, though according to the Debian wiki the time for this can be configured.But with Ubuntu a desktop user should be able to configure software updated to be done automatically via a GUI. https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AutomaticSecurityUpdates#Using_GNOME_Update_Manager
These are all valid reasons to request a password 🤔
Check your screen saver settings. Dunno which desktop environment you’re using. KDE should allow you to not enter a password for this.
Installing stuff runs
sudoin the background hence the password prompt. Updates = installing stuff. Look up “passwordless sudo”. At this point, when do you even want a password to be shown? If you don’t need a password, get rid of it entirely.Anti Commercial AI thingy
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You can configure this behavior for CLI, and by proxy could run GUI programs that require elevation through the CLI:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Sudo#Using_visudo
Defaults passwd_timeout=0(avoids long running process/updates to timeout waiting for sudo password)
Defaults timestamp_type=global (This makes password typing and it’s expiry valid for ALL terminals, so you don’t need to type sudo’s password for everything you open after)
Defaults timestamp_timeout=10(change to any amount of minutes you wish)
The last one may be the difference between having to type the password every 5 minutes versus 1-2 times a day. Make sure you take security implications into account.
Sudo doesn’t need a password, in fact I have it configured not to on the computers that don’t leave the house. To do this open
/etc/sudoersfile (or some file inside/etc/sudoers.d/) and add a line like:nibodhika ALL=(ALL:ALL) NOPASSWD:ALLYou probably already have a similar one, either for your user or for a certain group (usually wheel), just need to add the
NOPASSWDpart.As for the other parts you can configure the computer to not lock the screen (just turn it off) and for updates it depends on distro/DE but having passwordless sudo allows you to update via the terminal without password (although it should be possible to configure the GUI to work passwordless too)