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.

    • olutukko@lemmy.world
      101·
      9 months ago

      Now this is actually wrong. Firewall gui for example requires root. There are similar sysadmin guis that need it too

      • bizdelnick@lemmy.ml
        4·
        9 months ago

        Sysadmin GUI tools are designed to be secure by isolating GUI from privileged process. That is not true for a random GUI app.

      • zelifcam@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        9 months ago

        While I agree their comment is wrong - GParted , firewall and other apps all prompt for a password when launching from a properly configured environment.

    • Rustmilian@lemmy.worldEnglish
      7·
      9 months ago

      No. It’s ”you probably shouldn’t run them with sudo” , many GUIs need root for certain tasks. I recommend using pkexec instead of sudo, you can add it to the .desktop file and when you launch the application it’ll give you a GUI authentication prompt.

    • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl
      3·
      9 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
        6·
        9 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
          3·
          9 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·
        9 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
          3·
          9 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.

      • bizdelnick@lemmy.ml
        1111·
        9 months ago

        I have no idea what you are talking about. The answer to your question is: this is impossible and this is done for purpose. Don’t try to work in linux like in windows.

          • ursakhiin@beehaw.org
            32·
            9 months ago

            It’s not attitude they are giving you. It’s strong recommendation. It’s the strong recommendation of the entire Linux community.

            Sudo is different than run as admin and is not intended to be used to do things the way Windows does them.