When you try to install a package in another session then Gnome, you
will only get a notice that you don't have the right permission to install.

You can reproduce this by installing Gnome first and then XFCE for example.

Kind regards
Sven Grewe

This issue exists in Debian 12 when I have Gnome and then Xfce
installed. Running Gnome Software in the Xfce session. Installing MATE,
LXDE, LXQt after that, doesn't give me this issue any more for some reason.

I can't reproduce this with Xfce X11 session in Debian 13 having Gnome
installed too.

Regards,
Sven Grewe

Control: retitle -1 xfce4 [bookworm]: Doesn't always provide a polkit agent
Control: reassign -1 xfce4 4.18

This sounds like another duplicate of #843224, #862417, #900698, #1090384,
#1106490 and #1109686: the Xfce X11 session in Debian 12 didn't have a
dependency on a suitable polkit agent to use under Xfce, which meant there
was no way for gnome-software to prompt for the necessary privileges to
install packages.

When installing only Xfce, this was accidentally worked around by some
other package pulling in policykit-1-gnome as an implementation of the
polkit-1-auth-agent virtual package; but when also installing GNOME,
the dependency on polkit-1-auth-agent was satisfied by gnome-shell
(which cannot run under Xfce) so no other agent got installed.

In Debian 13, this was resolved by adding a dependency on mate-polkit to
the xfce4 metapackage.

In Debian 12, you can probably work around this by installing
policykit-1-gnome, or any other standalone polkit agent that can run
under Xfce (as selected by the OnlyShowIn/NotShowIn fields in its
.desktop file). The Xfce maintainers could resolve this in an oldstable
point release by giving xfce4 a Depends or Recommends on
policykit-1-gnome, if they want to (but now that Debian 13 has been
released, I suspect that this is not anyone's highest priority).

     smcv