Comment 52 for bug 12154

This feature would be very nice.
But Ubuntu should at least offer an option in the file manager(s) to "open as root" like some other distros (plus a warning somewhere in the window that it's dangerous, like Thunar and Mousepad do when running as root).

Right now, accessing/editing system files requires using sudo in terminal (gksudo was removed so it's not an option) or adding custom actions/scripts to the file manager (and nautilus-gksu was also removed), which is not very user friendly.