Today, gksu was removed from Debian unstable. It was already removed 2 months ago from Debian Testing (which will eventually be released as Debian 10 “Buster”).
It’s not been decided yet if gksu will be removed from Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. There is one blocker bug there.
Edit April 18, 2018: See my follow up post about the removal from Ubuntu
[…] gksu is dead. Long live PolicyKit […]
‘Long live PolicyKit’ but will sudo still be usable for GUI programs or are the following bugs fixed in Ubuntu 18.04?
$ pkexec geditUnable to init server: Could not connect: Connection refused
(gedit:12979): Gtk-WARNING **: cannot open display:
$ pkexec nautilus
Unable to init server: Could not connect: Connection refused
(nautilus:12990): Gtk-WARNING **: cannot open display:
adam@adam-thinkpad-t430:~$
In Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (or Debian Buster), you should use the gvfs admin backend instead of gksu or pkexec. If you want to edit your grub settings for instance, navigate to
admin:///etc/default/instead of/etc/default/Oh nice! Works on 17.10 too. I’ll use that instead of sudo when writing stuff next time I need to, just might be a while for people to learn that method of interacting with root directories!
Yes, I agree that the gvfs admin backend has major discoverability and usability issues currently. I guess the only mitigation is that gksu is not really discoverable either.
[…] Today, gksu was removed from Ubuntu 18.04, four weeks after it was removed from Debian. […]