I always deleted the standard Guest account and made a no-password Visitor account. Main objection to this Guest account is the default behaviour of “laptop lid close”, that will terminate all my open network connections.
For me, I do not need this Guest
Taking out guest sessions hasn’t really affected me in any significant way most probably because no one ever uses my device besides me. I do think it might come in handy sometime in the future as @popey explained.
I am also very particular about who I give access to my device as I get scared that they might tamper with my documents. A guest session would be the proper workaround that.
I use it like once every two months to let somebody use my computer. Creating a guest user without sudo privileges works for me too, so I will just do that now.
I never used the Guest session, but it does have its merit especially if an account gets corrupt or otherwise isn’t working.
But personally, I usually shut it off because I am the only one (or 2-3 of us) who log into the system.
Absolutely YES for the Guest session in 18.04! We’ve been using ubuntu in school since 2014 and all this time Guest session has been saving us teachers time and effort. Students do some work, and after lesson their files need to be removed from the system for the next class to come in, and apps must all have a default (pre-configured by teacher) look. So we create a user account, set everything we need - wallpaper, app launcher, apps settings etc. and copy it so that guest account looks exactly like this user account. Guest session is really a must have for us!
Yes for the guest session. It is very helpful when someone else wants to use the computer or to do presentations to have a clean, notification free desktop.
Yes in regards to having Guest Session available. I have had a number of people over the years which needed use of my computer and I did not want them seeing all my private notifications or files. Guest Session has been and is a great idea and is good to have.
i never used it. please delete this feature
I used it in the past. It was a great feature not to have people search your PC. I think the best thing is to offer this function but to let users enable / disable it as needed in the Users menu
I’ve used it in the past, for letting others use my computer. Please keep it, thanks!
We use it all the time for interns and other visitors to the office. It was removed? It still appears in 16.04 LTS. I’d be leery of saying “No one complained when we removed it” if it’s in reference to non-LTS releases. I’d imagine (ours does) that many corporate deployments of ubuntu stick to LTS releases.
I almost never used guest account, if I needed to allow other people to use my laptop I would create a user with no sudo rights and no access to anything outside their home folder. As some people still use it I think it would be good if guest user can be enabled via System Settings for those that need it. Also the guest user should not be able to read anything outside their home folder.
Hi, there are two common themes for guest-sessions and I used them both, and kinda miss them deerly
I have never cared for the feature, but I’m biased because I had to work with maintaining the AppArmor bits. While I understand the feature and how it is plausibly convenient for some use cases, I never personally had a use for it. The few times I used the feature for testing something outside of my main session, I never had confidence that the testing environment was authentic enough to trust and I always ended up creating a test user and logged in with that user instead.
I use the Guest session in 16.04 (I only use LTS releases). I use it so that I can safely hand out my laptop to visitors without worrying that they’ll break my machine or leave the SSD full of crud. Sometimes I also want my children to use my desktop workstation without worrying that they’ll mess something up. I also have a couple of old spare laptops that I can safely lend to friends on a longer-term basis; again they use the Guest account (“Andrew, my Macbook broke, have you got a spare laptop I can borrow for a fortnight?” “Sure…”)
Typically the guests will browse to a website and, occasionally, print something out, usually a web page or a PDF. Very occasionally they will want to open an MS-Word document in LibreOffice and perhaps print that. Also very occasionally they will want to access a document, MP3 or video on a USB stick, and perhaps copy that data to another removable storage device.
I find it annoying that it is difficult to customise the Guest account, for instance to remove some icons from the sidebar so that they don’t confuse newbie visitors, or to start the web browser automatically. I did once write a script so that root could zip up a Visitor (not guest) user home directory, which would then be cleared down and unzipped by /etc/gdm/PostLogin/Default each time Visitor logged in. I then set an empty password (no password) for the Visitor user and disabled the Guest login, so that GDM showed only my login and Visitor as options. This allowed me to customise Visitor’s desktop, safe in the knowledge that it would be reset to my preferences at each login, but without changing the defaults so it didn’t affect any new normal users I might create.
Maybe I am not your target audience, but I was disappointed when I learned that Kubuntu lost that function when migrating from LightDM to SDDM. My use cases for LightDM Guest Sessions:
Note for electronic banking or investments, I still preferred a live USB without persistence.
I favor guest-session, why :
1> Sharing of my Ubuntu laptop in office is easier as I can switch to guest-session and not have to worry about my passwords/files/personal-data being tampered with.
That’s about it.
Yes, for people who extensively share their laptops with others an option can be included in menu to turn guest-session on and the default for everyone can be off. Because I only occasionally share my laptop and need guest-session during office hours only.
I’ve used a guest session a total of maybe 2 times in all the years I’ve been using computers, not just Ubuntu but ANY computer. It’s handy to have when you need it but there are myriad ways to create an alternative that it’s not a big deal if it were to disappear. . .
Not really. Honestly, if I ever needed to use a guest session, I’d prefer if I just make it myself and customize it myself.