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.
That’s not how that should work. You also shouldn’t need that in Windows either.
Programs that need Admin rights will ask for it. There are a fee limited cases but most of the time it creates more problems than it solves.
From your comments I’ve read it sounds like there is more to this story. Can you share what you are trying to do? On gnome gnome disks can run fine under the user. It will elevate when it needs to and it is designed with least privilege.
For file shares root is pretty much meaningless in most contexts. If you don’t have access you don’t have access as authentication is handled server side. If you setup a automatic mount check your mount options as you can set it to be owned by the local user. Also if you mounted the share in a graphical file utility such as nautilus it will be mounted for the local user so you will not need root.
Root should be used very sparingly. It is not the same as Admin on Windows. It is almost equivalent to the SYSTEM user on Windows.