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.
It is rare that you would want to run an entire GUI program as root, and if it is needed, the program should prompt you for it. Do you have a specific use case where you need to do that regularly?
Not regularly, but the most common use I’ve encountered is text files used in various configurations.
Not necessarily a satisfactory solution for you, but the usual way to handle that is just using a text editor in the shell with sudo, like nano or vim. It’s pretty fast and easy once you get used to it. I don’t know if there are any good graphical ways of doing it.
I know. That’s what I’ve been doing for years. I could also just
sudo gedit file directory filenamebut it’s SO much easier to right-click “open as admin” which is why I asked.That is the 1% I mentioned, and the easiest way is installing this https://github.com/nautilus-extensions/nautilus-admin which I think is in the apt repos, so probably
sudo apt install nautilus-adminworks.But I STRONGLY encourage you NOT to install this, you’ve already made a mess of permissions on your computer that by your own account caused you many headaches by running graphical programs with sudo without any need.