Gksudo used instead of sudo in ubuntu-docs

[Richard Rudnick]

On Mon, 2006-05-29 at 01:52 +0930, Karl Goetz wrote:
> Robin Sonefors wrote:
> > According to the wiki, you shouldn't run graphical applications with
> > sudo, or else bad things will happen to you. 
> > 
> > Unfortunately, it doesn't really go into any details about why or how,
> > which makes everyone sound like your typical conservative: "No, don't do
> > drugs OR ELSE!". While the topic is up, and we're in the mailing list we
> > are, it might not be inappropriate to ask: Why?
> 
> one thing is people launching k3b as root. it chown s the users .Xauth
> to root, and user cant log in any more.
> I'm sure threes others :)

When the gksudo/sudo thing came up, I couldn't get any answers either,
but finally tracked it down. sudo uses your user home directory as home,
so any changes to dot files there get written as root. gksudo sets the
home dir as /root. You can check this by gksudo env | grep HOME and sudo
env | grep HOME.