Wireshark is a GUI tool, so it runs as your normal user, but it needs to be able to capture packets, which is normally a superuser thing. There is a facility for giving a normal user limited permissions to capture packets, but that's not something you want enabled by default. All good and reasonable, but it has the unfortunate consequence that you can't actually do anything with Wireshark out of the box.
Fortunately, they make it pretty easy to enable your permissions. You can just run this, and it brings up an ncurses UI to let you enable non-root packet capture.
$ sudo dpkg-reconfigure wireshark-common
It sets up a wireshark group and gives it permission to capture packets (using the dumpcap utility). Then you need to add yourself to the wireshark group.
sudo usermod -a -G wireshark myuser
You'll have to log out and back in for your user session to have the right permissions.
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