Comment 4 for bug 1270788

Hi Gunnar.

There are two issues in play. The real issue here is that Ubuntu gives users a session that looks and feels pretty much like a regular session, but then it deletes the user's data without adequate warning. That's a serious design flaw. That bug deserves its own bug report, with serious severity. A set of design changes to fix that bug could include changing the desktop background to something that reminds the user they're working in a temporary 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 subject of this bug #1270788 is merely a request to ameliorate the real problem by adding a warning at log-out time. This, you can reasonably call a "wish". This isn't the best way of fixing the real problem, it's just one relatively straightforward change that comes to mind that would help a bit. It should be a dependency of the real bug.

Ubuntu is specifically aimed at a general audience. We're lacking human interface design guidelines for session management (the subject of bug #882296), but the Gnome guidelines are relevant and say (at https://developer.gnome.org/hig-book/3.12/hig-book.html#principles-forgiveness ) "In all cases, the user's work is sacrosanct. Nothing your application does should lose or destroy user's work without explicit user action." Logging out is not an explicit action to delete data.

The attitude that users who don't pay attention will always run into trouble is what, for years, made computers only suitable for use by geeks like me (and I guess you too) who (speaking for myself) care more about how the computer works than we do about "real" work. There is no way I would let somebody I care about use a guest session in its current state. If I did, and they lost work in this way, I would vow never to try to get them to use open-source software again.

I'd be glad to help with blueprinting, design review, and testing any proposed design change.