[sf-lug] GKsu has long been EOLed (was: no more sudo for Ubuntu 18.04)

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Bobbie Sellers (bliss-sf4ever at dslextreme.com):

>     <https://itsfoss.com/gksu-replacement-ubuntu/>

Subject header was rather... um... wrong, so I've corrected it.

There's been for some years a small graphical tool called GKsu aka gksu,
which is a little gtk-based wrapper for sudo, although weirdly it always
behaved by default a little more like su than like sudo.  (IIRC, GKsu 
is paired with a companion tool called GKsudo, which has semantics
closer to sudo's by default.)  Anyway, long years ago, the upstream
maintainer hung up the towel, i.e., it's been orphaned, unmaintained.  I
can't remember why.  _Some_ gtk-based tools have over the years gotten
orphaned because the maintainers got tired of the irresponsible
behaviour of the GNOME people, gratuitously breaking compatibility and
necessitating near-total rewrites every time there's a major gtk
release.  (This is ultimately why the LXDE desktop project finally
abandoned gtk and recoded for Qt, creating the replacement LXQt
desktop.  Because they got tired of GNOME bullbleep, basically.)

Anyway {headscratch}, this isn't an Ubuntu issue.  _Every_ *ix
(including every Linux distribution that has been packaging gksu has
been abandoning it, because it's orphaned code that nobody's maintaining.

There are a large number of alternative ways to do what GKsu/GKsudo does:
sux, ktsuss, beesu, kdesu, gksudo, calife, chiark-really, xsu, and on
and on.[1]  Personally, _if_ I needed to run an X application with root
authority (a matter I'll return to, below), I'd just do 'ssh -Y
root at localhost' and then './some-x11-app &' to launch some-x11-app with
root authority.  (This requires having an sshd running, which you can
restrict to localhost-access only.)

The GNOME twinkies _used_ to say that GKsu/GKsudo users would be
encouraged to migrate to their New Shiny, something they called 'gksu
PolicyKit', but then all mention of the latter got unceremoniously
dropped.  But hey, I'm sure they'll have a replacement soon... and then
a replacement for the replacement, etc.


But the real question you should be asking is 'Why the Gehenna am I
running X11 graphical applications with root-user authority?'  It's 
dangerous to your security to needlessly run large graphical
applications with root authority, for gosh sakes.  Why on _earth_ would
you be doing that in the first place?

I expect the lame excuse I'd hear would be 'I had to elevate the
authority of the GNOME GEdit text editor to root privilege in order to
edit a configur root-owned text file in one of the system directories.'
No, you didn't.  Open a console, and use some nice little text editor
like nano (with sudo if you like sudo, or su to root if not)...

> As for me I don't have any problem with what Ubuntu decides to do.

...or sit around and wait for Canonical to tell you what to do.  ;->


[1] http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Security/root-with-x11.html