Comment 49 for bug 12154

This one has always irritated the heck out of me, because I often don't know in advance of starting Nautilus that I'm going to want to change something in a root-owned file. But I've been resigned to it because I imagined there was some insuperable difficulty in implementing it. And when my students hit this problem I get a little defensive and tell them it's not the developers' fault, it's due to the restrictions in Linux that prevent processes gaining root, which would create a security risk.

I've recently switched to Crunchbang. Imagine my surprise when I found the file manager there can do what I want! The file manager is Thunar. So I googled for 'thunar privilege escalation' and found an interesting article: http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntucat/file-browser-privilege-escalation-done-right/

More than 9 years since this serious usability bug was filed. Almost 7 years since that psychocats article.

The wonderful thing about open source development is the speed of progress, the way that problems are fixed quickly and systems are updated. Really?