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
    2717·
    8 months ago

    You don’t need to run any GUI programs as root.

    • olutukko@lemmy.world
      171·
      8 months ago

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

    • Rustmilian@lemmy.worldEnglish
      12·
      8 months 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.

      • bizdelnick
        13·
        8 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
          4·
          8 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          The commonality between these applications is when they were written, what (outdated) toolkit they use, etc.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
            12·
            8 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·
                  8 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.

                  • bizdelnick
                    1·
                    8 months 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.

      • bizdelnick
        1311·
        8 months 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.

          • ursakhiin@beehaw.org
            62·
            8 months ago

            It’s not attitude they are giving you. It’s strong recommendation. It’s the strong recommendation of the entire Linux community.

            Sudo is different than run as admin and is not intended to be used to do things the way Windows does them.