14 DAY TRIAL // It looks like Canonical plans to re-introduce support for guest sessions in Ubuntu Linux, and it's now asking the community how they feel about this feature for the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS release.
Canonical kicked off development of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) at the end of October with a focus on improving the overall stability and reliability of the operating system, being the next long-term supported release and all that. But they also plan on implementing some highly requested features, and one of these is guest sessions.
Software engineer Robert Ancell posted an announcement today on the community hub to get the pulse of the Ubuntu community and how they feel about guest sessions in Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. If you're not aware, Canonical had to remove guest session support in Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) due to the switch to the GNOME desktop and its GDM login manager.
"The intention was to reimplement this feature by 18.04 LTS if we continued with GDM in Ubuntu," said Robert Ancell. "However, it is worth considering if this feature is still required. If you currently use guest sessions or used them before the feature was removed can you please describe that so we have some data points on demand for this feature."
GDM doesn't support guest sessions, but it could
At the moment, guest session support is not supported in GDM (GNOME Display Manager), but if it turns out to be a very popular request among members of the Ubuntu community, it could be implemented for the upcoming Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) operating system, though it looks like it takes up a decent amount of time to maintain it.
Guest session lets you give access to your Ubuntu computer to anyone without compromising your user account and stored files. Canonical wants to re-implement guest support in Ubuntu, but if the community doesn't care about this feature they won't do it and continue to concentrate their efforts on more important changes. So let them know if you care about guest sessions in Ubuntu or not.