What is the Gnome doctrine for dealing with situations like this?
The most "official" statement I could find was this page on help.gnome.org:
Edit a file as the root user
It starts with a bold disclaimer:
Editing files as the root user is potentially dangerous, and may break
your system in bad ways. Take great care when editing files as the
root user.
Their suggestion is to launch gedit
from a terminal as the root user:
sudo gedit
Another option is to enforce permissions in the editor on file save, not on file open
In your particular example, this is not possible because /var/log/boot.log
is not readable by any user except root. So in order to display its contents, any application would require root privileges.
You may be able to combine @Organic Marble's answer with a .desktop file, so you could right-click -> Open with -> root gedit.
For the (probably) more common case when you want to edit a file that is owned by root and readable by your user, e.g. most config files in /etc
, I personally use Kate. It opens the file as your current user, and asks for your password when you attempt to save it. It does require the whole KDE/Qt ecosystem though, which may or may not be acceptable for you.