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
      12·
      2 years 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.

            • bizdelnick@lemmy.ml
              1·
              2 years 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@lemmy.ml
                  21·
                  2 years ago

                  gksu and kdesu are unsupported for >10 years iirc, they were not more secure than sudo and that’s one of the reasons they were abandoned. I’ve never heard about sux. Polkit is a bit another thing that indeed replaced them, however it does not and can not separate GUI and non-GUI processes. The process itself has to fork, drop privileges and draw a GUI after that. There’s no difference between running it via sudo or pkexec, however polkit provide additional protections to prevent running unsafe apps with elevated privileges.

                  PAM and GVFS are not “privilege elevation frameworks” whatever you mean by this.