Well, my old laptop flopped over and died, so I reinstalled Linux on a new one. I decided to try Gnome, since it'd been a long time since I tried any kind of large-scale window manager. It turns out "gnome" is somewhat apropos. When using it you'll feel like there's a tiny homonid wandering around your system doing things where you can't see.

I was able to play audio when logged into gnome, but unable to do so when logged in through a raw console. Not being able to do so in a raw console made sense when I figured it out -- I forgot to add myself to the 'audio' group -- but that meant it shouldn't work in Gnome either! The 'groups' command confirmed Gnome hadn't added me back somehow... I had to do a lot of digging to find out what it was actually doing.

Gnome uses "Consolekit" to manage login permissions, which lets it do things like XP-style fast user switching. Consolekit has tentacles in a whole lot of things: It's got the cooperation of PAM, X11, and dbus, as well as its very own system service.

Through the collusion of all these things it's able to give my own login access to things my login credentials don't without me even having to ask for them. That strikes me as extremely wrong.

That's strange. I'd be worried if i were in your position corona688. online pokies