Why is gksu no longer installed by default?

After a long discussion on #ubuntu-devel I now understand the thinking.

gksu can be installed on 13.04 with sudo apt-get install gksu and it will work.

If you decided to install gksu and are using the 64-bit version you'll need to run gksu-properties once to set the authentication to sudo. There is no need to do this on 32-bit as it's set to sudo by default.

However gksu is not recommended any more and it may be removed entirely from future issues of Ubuntu. In general the development team would prefer us not to use GUI applications as root but to use sudo and the command line instead.

In the long term pkexec is preferred however it's not very easy to use at the moment.

pkexec allows an authorized user to execute PROGRAM as another user. If username is not specified, then the program will be executed as the administrative super user, root.

see the man page man pkexec for more information.

In the mean time you can open a terminal CTRL+ALT+T or search for terminal in dash.

Do not close the terminal until you have finished this is important as the GUI program is a child of the terminal and if you close it the GUI program will also close.

Enter sudo -i

You are now logged on as root so can make the changes you want for example

gedit path_to_file 

to edit a configuration file, or

nautilus 

to run the file manager

When you are finished close the GUI application then in the terminal

exit

You can now close the terminal.

I just installed 13.04 : GKSU is already installed...