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.
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.