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.

  • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl
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    7 months ago

    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.