Dolphin 23.04 now allows you to use it as root, but not with sudo. We explain how it is done

Dolphin as administrator

For a long time, I don't know how long, KDE has been criticized for its philosophy of not allowing us to launch Dolphin as root. If we use Nautilus, GNOME Files, we can open a terminal, type sudo nautilus and start making all the changes we want with privileges. Sudo Dolphin doesn't work, and all it does is show a message that it can't be done like this for our safety, but that has changed a bit in Dolphin 23.04.

Dolphin 23.04 is part of the KDE Gear 23.04, the KDE suite of applications from April 2023, and this is one of its most outstanding novelties. Although many of us would like to be able to use the command from the terminal to get administrator permissions, in the end the result is the same, and you can even do something to make it even more productive: add the shortcut in the side panel. What we are going to do here is explain how to achieve all this in KDE if our distribution does not allow it by default.

Enable Dolphin 23.04 admin mode

This possibility was already available in KDE neon for a long time, but not as simple and direct as since this April. Right now, in KDE neon everything is ready to launch Dolphin 23.04 (and later) as root, but not in other distributions. The difference is that neon has the package installed by default kio-admin, while other distributions do not. Therefore, the first thing to do is to install that package. To make things clearer, I am going to give you the steps to follow to make the best use of this function.

  1. If we do not have it installed, we install the package kio-admin, as long as we already have Dolphin 23.04 installed.
  2. Next, in the Dolphin path bar, we select it, empty it and write, without the quotes, “admin://”.
  3. It will ask us for the password, and maybe several times, but by pressing Enter we can verify that we have privileges by going to the “bin” folder and seeing that we can delete what we want.

creating a shortcut

As an additional step, or better said, a different way to do it is to secondary click on the side panel and choose the “Add Entry…” option. We will see something like the following:

Add entry

We have three sections:

  • Label: is what we will see in the side panel. Dolphin root sounds like a good name to me.
  • Location: we indicate the location where you will start. If we put, without the quotes, "admin:///", we will already be starting as root when entering.
  • Select an icon: a panel will open in which we can choose the icon that we will see. A padlock seems the most indicated.

Now, on the left we will see one more "place" with the name that we have given it in "Label". When we click on it, it will ask us for the password and we will enter Dolphin as root. As data, to maintain the privileges we must navigate all the time through the folders on the right; if we click somewhere on the left panel, we will exit administrator mode.

It is not how some would like it, but it is now officially possible, no tricks and on any system if you have Dolphin 23.04 and can install kio-admin (it's usually in the official repositories).


3 comments, leave yours

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  1.   Pedro said

    Being able to use a konqueror as root is one of the reasons I always install TDE, plus TDE's Konqueror always was and still is far superior to Dolphin. It's a shame that Debian no longer includes the file manager profile in Konqueror, otherwise it would still use it as the default file manager.

  2.   Miguel said

    In Manjaro it works without problems, good advice.

  3.   inhabitant5079 said

    To do this I used to use Krusader which seems to me the best alternative to Dolphin that supports administrator mode and can be installed on any distro, or also Midnight Commander for simple things.