I occasionally need to know the names of programs. I asked here about “Run as Administrator” being added to the context menu (like in Windows), and the response was basically “can’t be easily done”. an example is if I wish to edit a config file it cannot be done without accessing the terminal. Knowing the name “gedit” is the real name of “text editor” is useful information in this use-case.

I am not afraid of the terminal, but I would never prefer it over a GUI. is there a way to find a program name/install location from right-clicking-details (or something)? So then I could open a terminal and “sudo programname”?

(As an aside, I prefer Linux overall, but every distro I’ve tried has a strong sense that if you’re using the GUI you don’t need or deserve admin controls. Program names in the menus are almost always different from their names in the terminal, and many what I would consider normal system settings, like the ability to act as an administrator, find where a program is installed are terminal only.)

This is Ubuntu with all the default stuff

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.

EDIT: As usual, it can be easily done.

  • @Nibodhika
    6•1 month ago

    Found one answer from him that sort of explains it all, it’s more of an XYZ problem now.

    • X: He couldn’t delete files on a remote share

    So he ran whatever program with sudo, and copied files over from there. Now he had lots of files owned by root, so he needed to runs text editors, file browsers and everything else with sudo because he didn’t own the files and didn’t realized that. He was annoyed about having to run everything with sudo so he created the first thread asking how to make a menu entry to be able to keep insisting on his solution to the X problem, so he asked for the Y problem (how to add a menu entry to run things as root).

    Someone answered him how to do it, but in the example the menu entry added is for using a specific program instead of the default one, so now (problem Z) he wants to know how to find the default program for open a file so he can use that tutorial to create the menu to allow him to keep opening random things with root (which is the original cause of all oh his headaches to begin with)