Yet another sudo password not working story

Yep, I’ve got it. My sudo password doesn’t work even though my user password works. They’re supposed to be the same, aren’t they?

I did NOT upgrade anything on my computer. One day, the password for sudo stopped working, but the same password would work to wake up from hibernation. Then today, the password stopped working to wake up from hibernation.

I followed instructions and booted the computer from a live Manjaro USB drive. I mounted the computer’s root drive. I typed `passwd --root /’. It worked fine. I was able to change the root password to something simple: ‘qqqqq’.

I then rebooted the computer and changed my user password to something more secure. Then I tried to run a command that needed sudo. I input my brand new secure password. Sudo returned ‘1 incorrect password attempt’. I tried again using the root password ‘qqqqq’. Sudo returned ‘2 incorrect password attempts’. I then CTRL-C’d my way out.

I then ran the same command using su. su accepted the password ‘qqqqq’. All went well.

Why is sudo so temperamental? What can I do about it?

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Sudo should use the same password as the user account but it is not the same as the root account. Sudo just lets the normal user account run a command as the root user without the root password. If you change the root user password you do not change the user password which is used in sudo while the root password activates the “su” command to login as root. That might be your problem that you may have a different password for root than the user account. You may want to try changing the main user password. I hope this heps and sorry if this didnt answer your question.