I am using the Guest account for a public computer in a small local library. I need to vastly reduce the number of apps in the dock on the Guest account. Safari and Pages are all I need.
Is there any way to do this?
Mac mini (M2, 2023)
I found the following here :
Not as far as I know. But what I’ve done in enterprise environments, is use a program called Deep Freeze. This program essentially returns a user profile back to default after logout, when configured properly. You would create a “second guest” account (as in, disable the built-in Guest user and create a Standard user account with the title “Guest”). From your administrator account, of course, you would configure Deep Freeze. And so on. Lol.
I found the following here :
Not as far as I know. But what I’ve done in enterprise environments, is use a program called Deep Freeze. This program essentially returns a user profile back to default after logout, when configured properly. You would create a “second guest” account (as in, disable the built-in Guest user and create a Standard user account with the title “Guest”). From your administrator account, of course, you would configure Deep Freeze. And so on. Lol.
Yes I've done very extensive searching and experimenting before posting here and none of the search result methods work on the current MacOS 13.
As I said in my previous post I am currently using a Standard user account instead of Guest.
I have used a product called Drive Vaccine in the past which is very similar to Deep Freeze. The problem with it was that system updates could not be automated. I have Deep Freeze in mind as an option if my current experiments don't work.
In case it's helpful to other users I am now exploring using a utility called Power Manager to trigger a file cleanup and log out after a period of user inactivity.
Hi Mac_25, Yes I found that using Power Manager (link in my earlier post) to trigger cleanup scripts and an automatic Log Out after 10 minutes of inactivity is working very well.
I used Automator to create the cleanup scripts and Power Manager to trigger them.
These are applied to a Standard user account rather than the Guest account so I can configure the dock and desktop exactly as needed.
This is meeting our needs and allows for automatic system updates as well.
Have you contacted Apple Support? They have an Enterprise sections that probably has addressed this before. Start here: Contact Apple for support and service - Apple Support
I don't know how to do what you want. If you do a Google search for "How to customize the Dock in a Guest Account on a Mac" you'll get some older methods which may or may not work now.
If you find a way be warned that there are two you definitely can't remove from the dock: Finder and Trash.
An alternative might be to create a non-admin user account with only Pages and Safari in the Dock. You could try to use Parental control to limit everything else. I've not tried it so you'll have to give it a trial ad error attempt.
No. A guest account user has no privileges for modifying settings.
If you need more room on the Dock see if you can at least change it to the bottom of the screen where there's more room for apps - that is if the guest user can. Don't have a guest user on my Mac so can't test it.
I appreciate getting a response, Old Toad, but I should further clarify my question.
I'm asking how an administrator can modify or create a custom template for the guest account.
The guest account defaults to a dock full of about 20 apps that Apple crams in which is completely inappropriate for our public library use case.
A custom template for the guest account would be ideal but I'm not finding any effective way to create this.
For now I'm trying an alternative approach which is to create a Standard User account but provide a script which deletes user data on Log Out - which is the feature of Guest accounts which is so desirable for privacy in a public setting like this.
Any suggestions for either option, custom Guest account or self-deleting Standard account, would be greatly appreciated.
I'm in a similar situation. Did you find a good solution?
I need to create a "custom guest account" that will have some software and settings pre-set, BUT at shut down, it will delete anything newly created and log out out of any Google or any web accounts the user logged in to.
How to customize the Guest account?
