Ubuntu, vanilla 20.04.3 LTS - Originally installed Ubuntu about June of 2018.
Somehow I recently messed up my own permissions and started getting polkit error messages about me not being a member of the Admin or Sudo users group or group 0 or some such.
I tried several suggestions, and it got [much] worse.
I've been doing Unix/DOS/OS 2/OS X/Windows/Linux for a long, long time - and didn't even know about polkit. (To me, polkit seems to be a work-alike for Microsoft's horrible and convoluted permissions system which I happily abandoned and changed over to Linux when I retired.)
I suspect this all started after I installed AnyDesk, which was necessary to remotely control a non-profit's Windows Zoom system off site. I've read where remote desktop software modifies polkit settings to prevent remote users from rebooting or shutting down a system, and sure enough AnyDesk does just that. Suspecting that was what caused this, I managed to remove AnyDesk, and then...
Now I can't update, upgrade, log out, shut down, reboot, mount a usb drive, eject a usb drive (yup, "Files" sees it, auto mounts it, but I can't view the contents, and I can't unmount it either), and a dozen other actions are all either ignored without an error message, or I get a "you do not have the necessary permissions" message or something very similar.
I reinstalled AnyDesk hoping it might fix things, but it didn't.
I've searched for solutions to all my Ubuntu or Linux problems and never had to post a question to resolve whatever issues I had, but this one's got me stumped.
After trying a few suggestions from here and elsewhere concerning polkit, I managed to get it to not issue error messages for a lot of things, rather it just ignores me completely. I had edited one or two polkit files to make sure I had the appropriate permissions, and that's when it went downhill big-time. It turns out polkit's configuration files are not kept in the same place they once were, various syntax and keywords are different, and some of my guidance came from threads that were eight years old. And frankly, I'm not even 100% sure I actually changed any settings.
I've searched for "how to reset polkit to default settings" and got nothing. Is this even possible?
So I'm asking...am I gonna have to reinstall from scratch? Or is there a way I can repair this? I have a lot of good data and applications that I need and use and it'll take me forever to get them all reinstalled and the data and settings for each restored.
I use Zfs, and have re-wound the system back two months with no success. I obviously did NOT delete any old application data during the restore. I only have one user login (mine) and I have just now enabled the root login so I can [hopefully] beat this thing into submission.
I apologize for being so wordy, but I know this is a specific issue because I've been unable to google even a hint of a solution, and I'd like to eliminate the 40 question "well did you try this" ping-pong banter, hoping somebody can point me in the right direction.
