I don’t know if Fedora (or plasma) do things differently but the normal default is that you need sudo to reboot/shutdown/etc. Then on basically all distros using systemd this behavior is modified via logind session and polkit. So the first thing to look at would be if a shutdown rule exists in /etc/polkit-1/rules.d/ that allow users in a certain group to shutdown/reboot in the first place. Mine looks like this: /etc/polkit-1/rules.d/50-shutdown.rules polkit.addRule(function(action, subject) { if ((action.id == “shutdown” || action.id == “reboot”) && subject.isInGroup(“wheel”)) { return polkit.Result.YES; } }); So every user in the wheel group can do it without password prompt. Without this UI elements for shutdown/reboot will try assuming they have the right but simply fail.