I found a (lengthy) guide to doing this but it is for gksu which is gone. I have to imagine there’s an easy way. I am running Ubuntu. There is no specific use case, it is just a feature I miss from windows.
EDIT: I always expect a degree of hostility and talking-down from the desktop Linux community, but the number of people in this thread telling me I am using my own computer that I bought with my own money in a way they don’t prefer while ignoring my question is just absurd and frankly should be deeply embarrassing for all of us. I have strongly defended the desktop Linux community for decades, but this experience has left a sour taste in my mouth.
Thank you to the few of you who tried to assist without judgement or assumptions.
There used to be an addon you could use, but I stopped using it ages ago so I’m not sure if it’s still maintained. I think it was called
nautilus-adminbut there was also another script.As a workaround, you can edit the address bar (ctrl+L, there’s no button because Gnome is weird) and add “admin://” to the start of the path. This is exactly what the addon used to do for you through a menu item.
As an added bonus, this doesn’t require you to run nautilus (and therefore all kinds of sketchy file parsers) as root.
As for why you seem to be the only person who wants this: running software as root has an annoying tendency to fuck up cache permissions (if environment files aren’t loaded correctly), has graphical glitches, and violates a lot of security assumptions developers make. Wireshark, for instance, will refuse to run certain code if you launch it as root because it wasn’t designed to protect the user from malicious scripts in that scenario. I’ve run programs as root for year sand I’ve seen the many ways in which it’ll subtly mess up your system.
There’s nothing preventing you from adding a context menu item to launch programs as root, but it’s not an included feature for good reason.
Oh my gosh, this is so useful. The lack of an address bar was driving me insane. Thanks.