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.

    • @olutukko
      16•1 month ago

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

    • RustmilianEnglish
      12•1 month 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.

      • @[email protected]
        -2•1 month ago

        Probably? They won’t run with sudo normally (in xorg at least). And only those explicitly allowed to be run with pkexec by maintainers will do. Of course it is possible to evade this restriction, but you definitely should not.

        • RustmilianEnglish
          4•1 month ago

          There’s plenty of GUI applications that’ll run just fine with sudo. For example BleachBit.
          The commonality between these applications is when they were written, what (outdated) toolkit they use, etc.
          Sudo is just not made for use with GUI and can possibly lead to bad behavior. pkexec leverages PAM & Polkit and is intended for GUIs.

          • @[email protected]
            -1•1 month ago

            It’s not when app was written. Wayland apps probably work with sudo, x11 don’t because sudo does not pass the $DISPLAYenvironment variable. It’s a correct behavior of sudo because running x11 apps with root permission you create a security hole.

                • RustmilianEnglish
                  1•1 month ago

                  Polkit was created in 2009 & PAM was created in 1995. GNU dates back to 1984, so… There’s still quite a handful of programs that are likely still maintained to this day that don’t properly take advantage of them or other auth systems made to be able to handle GUIs in a secure fashion. BleachBit being released in 2008, predates Polkit and afaik, bleachbit doesn’t leverage polkit by default, at least not on Arch.

                  • @[email protected]
                    1•1 month ago

                    Idk what is bleachbit. But I know that “auth systems” can’t “handle GUIs in a secure fashion”. The app itself can be secure or not. By default they are not secure if they provide a GUI running in privileged process.

      • @[email protected]
        6•1 month 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.

      • @[email protected]
        4•1 month 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.

      • @[email protected]
        1•1 month 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.

        • JediwanOP
          -1•1 month ago

          I have no idea what you are talking about.

          Your attitude.