Disable the new ubuntu 18.04 welcome screen

I found the solution to this myself so I'm posting it here for all those who might want to know.

The welcome screen is part of the gnome-initial-setup package. The first time a user logs into a new machine the command /usr/lib/gnome-initial-setup/gnome-initial-setup --exisiting-user runs.

for us simply removing the gnome-initial-setup package during kickstart is a suitable fix as we don't require any of the gnome initial setup stuff anyway (we don't want to create local user accounts or set the system time etc).

if you do still want the pre-login welcome stuff then you'll need a different solution.

I am in the same boat as Dean and found this article + another ones.

Here Rui Matos recommends to append InitialSetupEnable=false in /etc/gdm/custom.conf (in Ubuntu /etc/gdm3/custom.conf).

So edit /etc/gdm3/custom.conf and add the following:

[daemon]
InitialSetupEnable=false

Hope this helps someone else to get rid of the Welcome Screen.

If you don't want to uninstall the package, you can edit the file

sudo vi /etc/xdg/autostart/gnome-initial-setup-first-login.desktop

by adding a "#" (without quotes) to the beginning of the execute line like this:

#Exec=/usr/lib/gnome-initial-setup/gnome-initial-setup --existing-user