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.

  • @uzay
    15•23 days ago

    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?

    • JediwanOP
      2•23 days ago

      Not regularly, but the most common use I’ve encountered is text files used in various configurations.

      • @uzay
        7•23 days ago

        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.

        • JediwanOP
          0•22 days ago

          I know. That’s what I’ve been doing for years. I could also just sudo gedit file directory filename but it’s SO much easier to right-click “open as admin” which is why I asked.

          • @uzay
            2•22 days ago

            I would suggest right-click in the folder in your file explorer -> open in terminal -> sudo nano autocomplete file name (tab tab). At least to me that doesn’t seem that much more involved and is safer. Otherwise, as others have noted, there are apparently ways of doing what you want, but it is discouraged for good reasons.

          • @Nibodhika@lemmy.world
            2•22 days ago

            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-admin works.

            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.