touch-packages team mailing list archive

[Julian Foad <1378396@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Public bug reported:

Ubuntu gives users a "guest session" that looks and feels pretty much
like a regular session, but on logging out it deletes the user's data
without adequate warning. This is a serious problem because users, even
long-time users such as myself, may not expect this, and somebody they
care about *will* lose important data. For examples, see bug #435930:
the initial report, and comment #3, and comment #7. (Those examples are
from before there was a warning dialogue at the start of the session,
but that by itself surely won't prevent more occurrences.)

A set of design changes to fix this bug properly would need to involve
reminding the user at appropriate times while using the session that all
data they store in the "home" directory is temporary. This could include
changing the desktop theme and background to something visually
different from a regular session; changes to the file-save and
directory-browsing dialogs to remind users that Desktop and Documents
and so on are not permanent storage locations, and more. I remember
using SuSE Linux a few years ago, and you could log in as root, and the
root session was visually distinguished in several ways as a reminder.

The behaviour of a guest session should be specified in
<https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SessionHandling> (see bug #882296, "No complete
specification for how Ubuntu sessions are supposed to work").

Bug #435930 and bug #1270788 ask for reminder messages at log-in and
log-out time respectively, but I see those as only crude attempts to
ameliorate the real problem.

(I'm not sure what projects/packages this bug report should target:
lightdm, gnome-session, Ayatana Design, ...)

** Affects: lightdm (Ubuntu)
     Importance: Undecided
         Status: New

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1378396

Title:
  Guest session needs to remind user that data will be deleted

Status in “lightdm” package in Ubuntu:
  New

Bug description:
  Ubuntu gives users a "guest session" that looks and feels pretty much
  like a regular session, but on logging out it deletes the user's data
  without adequate warning. This is a serious problem because users,
  even long-time users such as myself, may not expect this, and somebody
  they care about *will* lose important data. For examples, see bug
  #435930: the initial report, and comment #3, and comment #7. (Those
  examples are from before there was a warning dialogue at the start of
  the session, but that by itself surely won't prevent more
  occurrences.)

  A set of design changes to fix this bug properly would need to involve
  reminding the user at appropriate times while using the session that
  all data they store in the "home" directory is temporary. This could
  include changing the desktop theme and background to something
  visually different from a regular session; changes to the file-save
  and directory-browsing dialogs to remind users that Desktop and
  Documents and so on are not permanent storage locations, and more. I
  remember using SuSE Linux a few years ago, and you could log in as
  root, and the root session was visually distinguished in several ways
  as a reminder.

  The behaviour of a guest session should be specified in
  <https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SessionHandling> (see bug #882296, "No
  complete specification for how Ubuntu sessions are supposed to work").

  Bug #435930 and bug #1270788 ask for reminder messages at log-in and
  log-out time respectively, but I see those as only crude attempts to
  ameliorate the real problem.

  (I'm not sure what projects/packages this bug report should target:
  lightdm, gnome-session, Ayatana Design, ...)

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