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.
Polkit (Policy Kit) is an authorization framework used in modern Linux distributions to manage access rights and privileges on the system. It allows unprivileged processes to communicate with privileged processes in a controlled and secure manner.
pkexec a command used to execute commands with elevated privileges, leverages both PAM (Pluggable Authentication Modules) and Polkit to authenticate the user and authorize the requested action.
PAM is a framework used in Linux systems to handle user authentication and authorization.
Check out Polkit & PAM
