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.

  • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl
    5·
    3 months ago

    I’ve always run gparted as root because it never seems to integrate with polkit right. A bunch of other tools that require low level disk access have the same problem. I’ve even needed root access for a program under WINE at some point to work around some silly permission bug

    You’re partially right, whatever can be accomplished by running nautilus as root can be done by using admin:// paths instead, but there are legitimate reasons to run GUI programs as root.

    • bizdelnick@lemmy.ml
      7·
      3 months ago

      Nope. Running GUI as root in the same X server as unprivileged apps is insecure because each of them can take control over privileged window. IDK if this issue has been addressed in Wayland, but anyway there are no wayland-only distros nowadays.

      • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl
        6·
        3 months ago

        Any X window can control any other X window for sure, but I’m not sure why a malicious program would go through nautilus when they can just alias sudo in .bashrc. It’s not like Linux users tend to do regular virus scans anyway.

        Wayland does prevent this flaw, but it also makes running GUI programs as root kind of messy.

    • MonkderDritte@feddit.de
      5·
      3 months ago

      Now i question why the whole GUI needs to run as root (even in working default config) instead of just the tool running the command with root.

      • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl
        5·
        3 months ago

        Many GUIs were written before polkit was set up and having to enter your root password constantly is a pain. In theory these programs could spawn a long running shell and elevate privileges in there, but that’s just running the program as root with extra steps.

        Also, most programs are more than wrappers around command line tools, so splitting them into a low and hig privilege component would be a pain. It would be much more secure, for sure, but there’s only so much effort you can expect from software given to you for free.