I presume this applies to any Gnome desktop. What is the difference between these two commands? According to the Ubuntu documentation and questions that reference it, the former also sets the $HOME environment variable and copy the .Xauthority variable to temporary location, but are those the only differences for all systems running Gnome, or do they only apply to Ubuntu?
What is the difference between gksu and sudo?
sudo
After searching at greater length and finding a few other sources, I think it's safe to say that gksu is nothing more than a wrapper around sudo in most cases. This source states that since gksu displays a password dialog, it's used for graphical applications (as we already know) because it can be used outside a terminal emulator. Otherwise, running sudo <cmd> from a launcher wouldn't work because the user wouldn't be prompted for a password. 