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.
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.
Many GUIs were written before polkit was set up and having to enter your root password constantly is a pain. In theory these programs could spawn a long running shell and elevate privileges in there, but that’s just running the program as root with extra steps.
Also, most programs are more than wrappers around command line tools, so splitting them into a low and hig privilege component would be a pain. It would be much more secure, for sure, but there’s only so much effort you can expect from software given to you for free.
But not gparted.
Partially, for sure. But there are some operations that are done natively. Those could be spawned off into a
dd
command, of course, but without rewriting that code, you need gparted to be elevated for copying (and I believe moving) partitions.