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.

  • @Nibodhika
    16•1 month ago

    See? This is why I’ve been asking this question several times. You caused a lot of headache on yourself and now you think running things as sudo is the solution when it’s what put you in a pickle to begin with.

    Let’s deconstruct what you said:

    The first thing I tried to do was delete a file off of a network share.

    If you couldn’t do that it’s because you were connecting to the share using your user, but for some reason on whatever program you used might have tried the admin busier when you ran the program as root. For the network share it doesn’t matter what user is on your local machine, so this is an issue on how you’re accessing the share on your user, not with needing to run the program as root

    Also, editing the name of a file copied from a network share.

    Of course, if you ran the above with sudo any file copied over will be owned by root, so now your regular user can’t edit them

    Also, editing text files

    I imagine you mean files copied over with the above problem, so same thing applies.

    also, formatting a thumb drive.

    Formatting thumb drives can absolutely be done without running the while program on root, why do you think you need this? How are you trying to do that?

    It has been a frequent headache.

    I can imagine, I’ve seen people run things like sudo npm install and now they have issues because their node folder is owned by root, it’s very similar to what you’re experiencing, a small issue at the beginning triggered an avalanche of issues because you ran one program with sudo. Do you see why everyone is very cautiously asking why do you think you need this?

    See how this was an XY problem? You’re asking how to add a “run as administrator” but what you actually want is to access a network share with your user. I don’t mean any of this in a bad tone, but there’s a reason people keep asking you why, it’s because what you’re asking is almost never a good idea and leads to problems such as this, imagine if you had been able to create that menu item? You would start using it and getting more and more files owned as root that would cause you to need this more and more until you end up just running everything on root.