Comment 6 for bug 838404

I don't dispute that this bug is a duplicate of bug 796076, but I am posting here to address some advice from david6 which is potentially dangerous if applied.

It is a bad idea to run graphical programs that save user-specific configuration data, like gedit, with sudo (without special flags to make it behave like those programs[1]) rather than gksu/gksudo/kdesudo. But not for security reasons. This is a bad idea because such programs often create or modify configuration data in such a way that the configuration files are accessible only by root, and then the application is fully or partially broken when run by the user unprivileged. (This could then become a security problem if the configuration data contained secret information which was then oversimplistically changed back to be owned by the non-root user, but I am not aware of any situation where this has been a problem, especially since such users are usually administrators who are permitted to read the data anyway.) See https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RootSudo for details.

[1] Actually, those programs are graphical frontends for sudo, and they make sudo behave properly by passing special flags such as -H. (But it is a bit more complex than that, so you may still experience some problems if you run sudo -H instead of gksu/gksudo/kdesudo.)