ubuntu and privilege elevation in i3wm

Elevation uses several components:

• the program must be running in a ConsoleKit or systemd-logind session – ideally, all of your X11 programs should be in the same session.

  If your distribution uses systemd, run loginctl show-session "$XDG_SESSION_ID" and look for "State=active".

  Otherwise, run ck-list-sessions and verify that it shows your X11 session as both "local = TRUE" and "active = TRUE".

• the session must have a PolicyKit agent – this is the piece of software that displays elevation prompts.

  Run /usr/lib/policykit-1-gnome/polkit-gnome-authentication-agent-1 and see if it helps.

To test elevation, you can use pkexec /bin/sh or pkaction.

AFAIK, privilege elevation has nothing to do with the window manager. Use gksudo for GUI apps that require root privileges.

For example:

gksudo synaptic &

A more recent answer could be to install lxpolkit.

sudo apt-get install lxpolkit

And then add the following to your ~/.config/i3/config:

exec --no-startup-id lxpolkit

A similar approach may work with other authentication agents listed here https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Polkit#Authentication_agents

source: https://www.reddit.com/r/i3wm/comments/chjnng/how_do_i_fix_authentication_agent_in_i3wm/