Synaptic does not work on Wayland

[vanillajonathan]

No description provided.

[gunterkoenigsmann]

The problem that causes this is that in order to improve security wayland doesn't support gui applications to run as root. The preferred way to get root access for an application is to make it run unprivilleged and to elevate the rights of a worker task using policykit, whenever needed.

[gunterkoenigsmann]

See also:

• https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/synaptic/+bug/1551951
• https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1274451

[julian-alarcon]

See also:
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=818366

[franko108]

Same problem on Debian 9 with Gnome 3.22.3, opening from a menu doesn't work, from shell is such an error:

$ synaptic-pkexec
No protocol specified
Unable to init server: Could not connect: Connection refused
(synaptic:6206): Gtk-WARNING **: cannot open display: :0

Firstly prompted for a password, and then error above.
Same situation with synaptic or synaptic-pkexec command. Launched as root or a non root, same error.

EDIT.
Actually, it happened to me after I installed proprietary ATI VGA drivers (xserver-xorg-video-ati libgl1-mesa-dri). Before that, Synaptic did work, but on the small resolution (1024x768)

[DarkFenX]

Doesn't work on 1920x1080 on intel OSS drivers. I very much doubt it depends on this though.

[vanillajonathan]

References to X11:
https://github.com/mvo5/synaptic/search?l=C%2B%2B&q=X11&type=&utf8=%E2%9C%93

[gunterkoenigsmann]

Nah... ...it is simpler: Wayland tries to enhance security by making applications choose if they want root rights or access to the graphical display. Synaptic wants the first - and therefore doesn't get the latter. The only way around this is drawing the gui from a non-root process and using policykit to create a worker process that does the things root rights are needed for.