I’ve had this issue several times now: on screen unlock (e.g. wake up after S3 sleep), I find my entire desktop locked up by a modal dialog stating “Authentication required to update metadata”:
I can click either button all I like (they do respond, dialog is not frozen), but nothing happens. The dialog never disappears, and I typically have to kill my GNOME session from another TTY. I typically lose work because of this.
This is the org.freedesktop.Flatpak.metadata-update polkit action being triggered. It’s likely being triggered by gnome-software, but the rule itself comes from flatpak.
It’s configured upstream to allow users of an active session the permission without prompting, but to require admin authentication when requested from an inactive session.
I guess it’s possible that a metadata refresh is being requested while your machine is supposed to be asleep, and that’s causing the auth prompt to get stuck in gnome-shell somehow?
Do you have any custom polkit rules in place?
Some quick digging on the Fedora bug tracker finds 2400464 – "Authentication is required to update metadata" which looks like the same issue. There seem to have been a few weird polkit issues coming from Fedora recently, and I can’t immediately see anything that gnome-software or flatpak are doing wrong, so please follow this up with the Fedora folks so that they can diagnose it, as it looks distro-specific to me.
They will probably want to see the output of journalctl -S -2m -u polkit.service immediately after you reproduce the issue (within 2 minutes of it).
Thank you for your pointer, this is indeed what’s going on. I’ve experienced the bug in the linked report for quite a while now, but as I could just click the dialog away most times, I left it at that. However, the entire desktop being locked was the straw that broke the camel’s back, and I had to do something about it. I’ve chimed in on the existing bug report, and hope that it’ll get picked up…
