Ubuntu – How to hide the switch user part of Unity’s top panel session indicator

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In Ubuntu 13.10's Unity Panel (the top panel, not the launcher), the session indicator (top right corner) shows the names of previously logged in users.

This allows switching users, but for privacy reasons I would like to be able to hide those user names, as a lot of people use machines in our computer pool. It seems that in older versions of Unity there was a dedicated 'user-indicator' in the panel for that purpose, which could be configured via dconf.

Here are some of several pages that I've found on which is explained how to show/hide things in the old user indicator as well as the session indicator:

Related dconf keys, that were referred to in different posts, are:

  • apps > indicator-session > user-show-menu

  • com > canonical > indicator > session > user-show-menu

Unfortunately, all these keys don't exist anymore. The user indicator seems to have been merged into the session indicator. The graphical tool Ubuntu Tweak doesn't have the config settings any more either.

Is there any way to hide the switch user part of the session indicator? Thanks 🙂

Best Answer

What I have used in the past is the following from this link: How to easily hide the username in the Unity panel

Steps:

  1. Install dconf-editor: apt-get install dconf-tools

  2. Open it and navigate to apps-->indicator-session and on the right-side, uncheck show-real-name-on-panel

  3. Reboot

Additionally, you can open a terminal and type the following:

gesettings set com.canonical.indicator.session user show-menu false

Or download and install Ubuntu Tweak from here: http://ubuntu-tweak.com/ and follow these steps to turn off Fast User Switching which will hide the list of other users:

  1. Click on Tweaks
  2. Click on Miscellaneous
  3. Check the box next to Disable "Fast User Switching"
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