Yes, the recent update of manjaro-hotfixes is indeed the reason why the authentication prompt suddenly appears now when trying to mount a drive!
It was supposed to delete obsoleted and deprecated config options by removing those 2 files:
$ pamac list -f manjaro-hotfixes
/etc/dbus-1/system.d/org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.Manjaro.conf
/etc/polkit-1/rules.d/99-manjaro.rules
Discussion where the decision was made: https://forum.manjaro.org/t/stable-update-2024-01-13-dbus-broker-units-has-broken-light-display-manager/155093/14
The problem is that in the second file, there was also the rules needed to mount a drive/partition as a normal user…
So anybody who wants to solve this and get the old behavior just need to add:
polkit.addRule(function(action, subject) {
if (action.id.indexOf("org.freedesktop.udisks2.") == 0 && subject.isInGroup("wheel")) {
return polkit.Result.YES;
}
});
in a file in the /etc/polkit-1/rules.d/ directory. You can name it as the old one that was deleted (99-manjaro.rules) or anything else following the same syntax (I’m using 10-admin.rules on my other Linux systems) and after a reboot, it should be solved.