Here's how I created a restricted but not ephemeral guest account on an Ubuntu 18.04 desktop computer that can be used without a password.

Create a user that can login without a password

First of all, I created a new user with a random password (using pwgen -s 64):

adduser guest

Then following these instructions, I created a new group and added the user to it:

addgroup nopasswdlogin
adduser guest nopasswdlogin

In order to let that user login using GDM without a password, I added the following to the top of /etc/pam.d/gdm-password:

auth    sufficient      pam_succeed_if.so user ingroup nopasswdlogin

Note that this user is unable to ssh into this machine since it's not part of the sshuser group I have setup in my sshd configuration.

Privacy settings

In order to reduce the amount of digital traces left between guest sessions, I logged into the account using a GNOME session and then opened gnome-control-center. I set the following in the privacy section:

Then I replaced Firefox with Brave in the sidebar, set it as the default browser in gnome-control-center:

and configured it to clear everything on exit:

Create a password-less system keyring

In order to suppress prompts to unlock gnome-keyring, I opened seahorse and deleted the default keyring.

Then I started Brave, which prompted me to create a new keyring so that it can save the contents of its password manager securely. I set an empty password on that new keyring, since I'm not going to be using it.

I also made sure to disable saving of passwords, payment methods and addresses in the browser too.

Restrict user account further

Finally, taking an idea from this similar solution, I prevented the user from making any system-wide changes by putting the following in /etc/polkit-1/localauthority/50-local.d/10-guest-policy.pkla:

[guest-policy]
Identity=unix-user:guest
Action=*
ResultAny=no
ResultInactive=no
ResultActive=no

If you know of any other restrictions that could be added, please leave a comment!