Why was gksu removed?

[steven43]

Was there any particular reason why gksu was removed, other than just because?

I know most people used gksu and sudo to elevate to the root user. I actually used it to run a series of FireFox browsers as different users within the same X session.

Removing gksu has made this a bit difficult. And, as far as I know, there isn't an alternative (other than opening a terminal and doing a sudo -H -u otheruser /usr/bin/firefox).

Was there a particular reason why gksu was removed? And what is the alternative for running applications as other users within the same X session?

[deadflowr]

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=892768

I actually used it to run a series of FireFox browsers as different users within the same X session.
There should safer and better options to do that.
like this: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/108784/running-gui-application-as-another-non-root-user

[steven43]

Many thanks! I had not thought about passing SUDO_ASKPASS to sudo and setting it as /usr/bin/ssh-askpass I think this might work.