From the following questions
we see that gksu will no longer be supported in the long term, and it will not be installed by default from >= 13.04. Instead we should use pkexec which does its job fine for non-graphical applications but not for apllications on the GUI:
pkexec gedit
when replacing gksu in a .desktop file
EXEC=pkexec /usr/bin/gedit
or when I run a python script to run a graphical application with root permissions I get the following error:
>>>subprocess.Popen(['pkexec','gedit'])
** (gedit:3203): WARNING **: Could not open X display
How would I have to re-write my scripts or my .desktop files to support an authentication dialog and run an application as root if I should not have it depend on gksu?
sudo
I saw said something about integrating support for gksu into sudo. Another thing to look at issudo -A
which according to the man page launches a (possibly) graphical login.