Because they decided to ditch gksu for some reason, we are forced to only use pkexec. I am currently very new to Ubuntu 18.04 and I am facing this as an issue probably also because of my incompetence.

I followed the suggestion provided by Radu Rădeanu here How to configure pkexec? however I am having issues. In my situation, I get the following error

Authentication is required to run gedit Authenticating as: meat258,,, (meat258) Password: polkit-agent-helper-1: error response to PolicyKit daemon: GDBus.Errorrg.freedesktop.PolicyKit1.Error.Failed: No session for cookie ==== AUTHENTICATION FAILED === Error executing command as another user: Not authorized This incident has been reported.

But I know that my root password is correct. Assuming I am new, any help would be appreciated.

/etc/lsb-release in my system lists,

DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu DISTRIB_RELEASE=18.04 DISTRIB_CODENAME=bionic DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu 18.04.3 LTS"

This is Ubuntu MATE. If you need to know any more info, I would happily provide. Please assume I am a novice user.

The actual command I used was

pkexec gedit

It's true that gedit isn't installed by default on Ubuntu MATE so I installed it with sudo apt install gedit . Besides, it's such a lightweight program and an example used in that other Ask Ubuntu post. It's unfortunate only I got this issue.

I am trying to set up pkexec to work like gksudo would have while opening apps from the menu. It could be just that the info shared by Radu Rădeanu on that previous post was too technical for my little brain.