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.

  • bizdelnick@lemmy.ml
    1·
    7 months 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.

    • Rustmilian@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      7 months 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      The commonality between these applications is when they were written, what (outdated) toolkit they use, etc.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.

      • bizdelnick@lemmy.ml
        1·
        7 months 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.

            • Rustmilian@lemmy.worldEnglish
              1·
              7 months 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.