I’m sticking with 16.04 LTS on the boxes (laptops) for all the folks I support (senior citizens, senior centers, nursing home residents, etc.), as 16.04 still has 3 years security/updates support from Ubuntu - which is GREAT!
End of Life for 16.04 is April 2021. I trust we’ll have SOMETHING great for 18.04 before too long.
Thank you.
I miss this function very much. I run about 50 Linux PCs in school (1st contact for students with gnu/linux). The guest account is a great help.
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I hope you will continue with 16.04 LTS (and it’s outstanding guest account) which has another 3 years of support for a short time while the Ubuntu Team (official or community) gets this fixed! I love playing with other distros too, but Ubuntu has EARNED a reputation of solid, secure, compliant, and up-to-date and I trust it for use by those who do not comprehend CyberSecurity.
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Not sure in the 5 months this thread has existed that @robert.ancell looked again. I’m certain he only posted once in it.
Given that - all the comments appear to be pointless.
Quoting the original post:
it’s important we can justify that a significant portion of our users make use of this feature
So no, all those comments are not pointless. Re-implementing the feature with GDM represents a significant amount of work and it didn’t make it to 18.04, but that doesn’t mean the idea has been abandoned.
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But I’m sure I’m not the only one who saw someone from Canonical make a post regarding 18.04 - and then no more contact in the thread.
I understand that there’s a significant amount of work - that’s not the issue here - it’s the lack of contact after asking for people to do this
Edit - ftr - this doesn’t affect me personally - I use Xubuntu.
This is Robert’s follow-up:
Please note that there are two issues. While the lack of guest session support in GDM does not affect flavors which use LightDM, the fact that the security layer provided by AppArmor is broken affects everyone.
In a different thread?
That seems rather counter productive.
@robert.ancell Might be best to close this one then?
I setup computers for seniors (i.e. local Senior Center, others). Most of these folks are not Cyber Security knowledgeable. Guest sessions allows seniors (anyone) to check their banks and other accounts without their data being available to others after logging out. Guest Sessions is critical to me and those I assist. I volunteer my time and cannot afford to purchase commercial products for the computers I donate.
I used guest session in my house. It is helpful when my kids friends or other family guests want quick access to a PC, often just to log into a web browser and print something. Of course I can create a dummy account to give them an easy password, but the guest session was the perfect solution for us.
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@flocculant - I don’t seem to have any means of closing a thread.
However, thanks everyone for the feedback. As people have seen, 18.04 has been released and does not have guest support. This thread will be useful as a data point in any further discussions about this feature.
Thanks for mentioning that. Yes, me too, I forgot to mention my home computers in my posts (I’m old…). My kids and grandkids know when they come to visit grandma and grandpa they will have I-net access ‘on the spot’.
From family and friends at home, to guests in the workplace (who could do real damage w/o guest account), to seniors and others - Ubuntu Guess Session has been a critical NEED for thousands (tens of thousands?) of Ubuntu users.
Not having a secure Guest Account is keeping me from upgrading to 18.04 on all computers I support (volunteer, not paid) at this time. This is NOT a problem yet as there are still 3 more years of security support on 16.04 LTS.
I’m using 18.04 at home w/ my own modified guest session (NOT fully secure but ok for my grandkids).
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I’ve done that for you 
People interested can see the follow up at Brain dump on guest session progress - Desktop - Ubuntu Community Hub
I also added the follow up link to your original post.
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