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Olliver K
Asked: 2019-01-24 14:52:30 +0800 CST

How to enable guest sessions on Ubuntu 18.04 or later?

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Is there any way you could revive Guest Sessions in a future LTS distro? Guest sessions are good security - they give me just enough power to do what I need to do on a daily basis without risking my system. In short, Guest sessions save me from myself. I had upgraded from 16.04 to 18.04, gotten a problem I couldn't fix and was all to happy to wipe and rebuild my hard drive and return to 16.04. I can't be the only one who feels this way.

gnome guest-session

1 Answers

  1. Is there any way you could revive Guest Sessions in a future LTS distro?

    You seem to believe we can get this back into a distribution but we are just users (except for a couple of people that are also employees of Canonical).

    And if you want it back: install LightDM.

    sudo apt install lightdm

    Create a configuration file

    sudo gedit /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf.d/50-enable-guest.conf

    and copy the contents below to it:

    [Seat:*]
allow-guest=true

    Reboot the computer and pick lightdm at the login screen.

    Do read the wiki page CustomizeGuestSession and the discussion on removing guest accounts.

    Before you start using it: Guest Account is NOT secure: the data from normal users on the system is not secure from the guest. The same goes for the data from the guest. And the guest can view system files.

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