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.
What program? What files? Why do you need to run them with sudo? You’re either being purposefully vague or you don’t even know why you think you need this.
The question is not about a specific use-case, but a general one. An alternative reading would be “Is there a way to run short commands as root without switching to the terminal?”
I have had to un-teach dumb things that people learn from Windows.
A menu item to run a GUI program as root it is indeed a rather absurd scenario. It suggests that you want to violate the admin/user barrier which is intended to be difficult to surpass except in certain circumstances.
There can be a lot of things under the hood that are necessary to run a GUI program as root depending on whether you’re using X11 or Wayland or something more esoteric. It’s doable though.
But instead of doing that, why not just learn how to use the command line? Every administrative task can be done via the command line, but not every administrative task has a GUI counterpart. So you’re going to need to learn to use the command line sooner or later.
OP asks a relatively simple question, and gets scolded as it committed murder.
For all we know OP is the only user and is just playing with Linux, and just wants a simple (probably unnecessary) shortcut because he’s GUI oriented.
This is kind of someone asking how to open their lunchbox easier, and get treated like they are giving a copy of their house keys to everyone in town.
Chill… Not everyone is running a maximum security level server. If OP screws their system (like most of us do at some point), I’m sure a fresh re-install would be enough for them.
It’s a relatively simple question, but it’s a loaded question, it’s like someone asking you how you run “apt-get upgrade” on Windows, the question implies that this is possible and necessary, the correct answer to any such question is “what is it that you’re trying to accomplish? Why do you think you need this?”. 99% of the times the answer is that the person is trying to do something else entirely, this is known as the XY problem, the person has problem X and is asking how to solve problem Y that he’s having because he thinks that’s the only way to solve X.
In OP’s case he caused the issue by running one program as root, and then everything that program touched needs root now, so he needs to run things as root because he’s running things as root, it’s a cyclical problem, if he had never ran things with sudo he wouldn’t need to run things with sudo. Everyone was asking him why he feels he needs that and he wasn’t answering, in one answer he let it slip his original mistake that caused all of this headache.
Yes, the community can be a bit toxic sometimes, but if everyone is asking you “why you think you need this?” There’s a good chance you don’t, and if you refuse to answer the questions of people who are trying to help you, you make it real hard to be helped.
Sometimes people want to be generally helped, and sometimes people just want an answer to their question. If the answer is “it’s impossible” then that’s a valid answer, but if the answer is “I’m not going to tell you, instead I’m going to assume that what you actually want is me to teach you why you were wrong to ask the question in the first place” then theres a good chance that actually they just wanted an answer, and you deciding for them what they need comes across as patronising.
It’s not impossible, but each DE has their own context menu, each application has their own context menu, without understanding his use case it’s impossible to answer the question. If he had said I want to edit root files then the answer would be the nautilus-admin plugin, but he kept shutting himself and not answering simple question about what is his use case which made it impossible for anyone to answer.
If someone asks how to tie a noose you ask for context, answers are vastly different if he’s trying to tie his shoes than if he wants to hang himself. Even if you plan on helping the person hang themselves you need to know the use case. Read some of the replies he sent and you’ll see his entire problem is caused by him having run things with sudo to begin with, and now having lots of permissions problems that he thinks the best solution is an easier way to run programs with sudo, which will put him in more of the same situations needing that more and more. He can use his computer however he wants, but at that point it might be easier to just login with the root user and be done with it.
Thank you lol this thread got absurd.
“I won’t tell you to open your lunchbox until you tell me what you brought for lunch and the allergies of anyone in your family.”
Except the question you’re asking is more akin to “How do I fold my lunchbox?” And refused to provide any more meaning to what you want other than “I used to fold my tinfoil, I now have a lunchbox and want to fold it in the same way, it’s not difficult”.
You’re asking something that you shouldn’t do, you only need this because you already did it before and broke a lot of the permissions in your system which by your own account caused you headaches. In other words you already folded the lunchbox and when it broke instead of stopping and thinking about what you did wrong you proceeded on asking on the internet what’s the proper way to fold your lunchbox.
Amazing. Yes, when I said “open” I actually secretly meant “fold”, a totally normal and common mistake users make when accessing the contents of a lunchbox. Everything is an XY problem!
Except you didn’t, that’s what you’re missing, you’re asking how to do a Windows thing on Linux, and despite everyone telling you you don’t need this you keep insisting on it. Your whole problem started because you ran a program with sudo, and instead of acknowledging your mistake and asking how to fix the original problem and un-clusterfuck your drives you double down and insist the community is being toxic because they refuse to tell you how to easily keep insisting on the error.
It is, run as administrator is a windows concept, in Linux programs that need elevated privileges will ask for it, so if you need a specific program to be entirely elevated you’re asking something quite unique. I’ve asked multiple times, I’ll ask again, why do you want this? Give me a concrete example of what you’re trying to do, just saying running any program as root is not a good answer.
Since I know you’re not going to (because I already asked at least 3 times and others have as well and you haven’t answered anyone, so I think you don’t know why you want this other than “because Windows has it”), here’s the generic answer for you, on the login screen type root as your user and input your root password, there you go, you don’t even need that menu item anymore since everything runs as root now, just like in Windows.