Guest session in 18.04 LTS & Webcafé

Desktop
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OK, I just see this thread and that one: Guest sessions in 18.04 LTS - are they needed? - Desktop - Ubuntu Community Hub

  1. Here is my personal use case:

Party @ home, i switch to a guest session, go to firefox, install adblocker, and then tell that everyone is welcome to put the music they want (!yt mostly).
It might sound like a niche, but then I don’t have to care to hide my ssh key and other private data.

  1. Now this is my use case with my association (Ubuntu-fr LoCo team):

We go to event such as Music festival where we have a booth (webcafé). There people can use the 12 PC to discover Ubuntu and also get on internet to find they car to back home :slight_smile:

To have more volunteer time spend with the people rather than the machine, we use guests sessions. (people in public event want to have fun, they take webcam selfies with cheese (the app) 's effect and set it as background, they change many setting to discover ubuntu, the browser website and forgot to log out. Our action when we see someone leaving a pc, is just to logout the guest session, and then to relog on new guest session

Without guest session, I am not sure how to keep it simple. Maybe there are other way than guest session to do what we do, but until we find it, guest sessions are our answer to do that.

I have also see this ask thread to reactivate it : https://askubuntu.com/questions/915415/guest-session-stopped-working-on-ubuntu-16-10-and-17-04/915417#915417
But it doesn’t work for 18.04 (ofc, because no lightdm there :confused: ) . If there is the risk of a su in the guest session, it is okay. we have only few people that try to play on gnome-terminal, versus put everything back manually.

Note: I am currently installing the 12 PC for the next week 1st festival of the year, and I just got that we don’t have guest session anymore :open_mouth:. Any input on this are welcome.

NB: Webcafé in video : http://webcafe-ubuntu.org/webcafe/le-webcafe-ubuntu-aux-vieilles-charrues-2016-la-video/

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It’s possible to install and switch to LightDM on Ubuntu 18.04. Can’t tell to which extent it would create issues which would affect the user experience, though.

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The more I read about how people use the guest session the more I feel it was not a good decision to remove it.

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I am a big fan of the Guest session myself and I think not only Ubuntu but ALL Ubuntu flavors (Xubuntu etc.) must ship it as well! This is a necessity in modern life and I personally will switch to whatever (free!) OS it is that makes the guest session a part of my (user) experience.

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A more useful thread might be “Help bring back Guest Sessions” where the folks who want to bring it back can collaborate. The previous thread (Guest sessions in 18.04 LTS - are they needed?) demonstrated demand for the feature.

Since this thread is not going in that direction…

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