They show no password prompt for the user with the “active” session for removable drives. Only system drives always require admin auth for formatting and partitioning. Maybe your session setup is not completely correct so your user session is not marked as the active session or you tried it with a drive that is considered a system drive.

I mean the exact same 2.8GB file, with the exact same USB-C stick took FU***** 3 seconds on Linux !!

For that test you should run sync afterwards to make sure the file was really written and is not waiting in a cache.

It is possible to format removable drives without root access through udisks2, e.g with gnome-disks or KDE ISO image writer. GNOME Impression is another tool that should work.

Sorry, I have no idea.

The relevant polkit policies should be defined here: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/blob/main/src/login/org.freedesktop.login1.policy

Disabling is done with some rules like this: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=152565

polkit.addRule(function(action, subject) {
  if (action.id.indexOf("org.freedesktop.login1.power-off") == 0) {
    return polkit.Result.AUTH_ADMIN;
  }
});

Some other examples: https://gist.github.com/grawity/3886114

Hmm, never had cups-browsed enabled as I do not need network printing with LDAP or legacy cups. Discovery using DNS-SD/mDNS and driverless printing work perfectly fine without it.

I am not sure if the driverless discovery ever can generate a PPD with arbitrary commands.

For Linux maybe timekpr-next and some custom scripts to sync the time with the time limit server?