Hey GNOME folks,
I’ve got a few custom apps that launch at login via .desktop files in ~/.config/autostart, but I’d like to delay some of them (like backup sync clients) by 15–30 seconds to avoid slowing down initial session load.
Is there a GNOME-native or recommended way to handle delayed autostart? I saw some older workarounds using Exec=sh -c ‘sleep’ tricks, but curious if anything cleaner exists now or is being planned?
Thanks in advance for any tips or links!
— Jhonn Mick
Hi,
There is a special key for that: X-GNOME-Autostart-Delay=15, to add to the *.desktop file.
Where did you get that information from? That setting doesn’t exist, and as far as I can find never existed.
I’m using that key for one of my startup app, it’s actually quite old, I think I did it when I was using Gnome 2, and never touched the desktop file since then.
I’m currently on Cinnamon, and that key is still supported there.
TBH, I don’t know about the current support on recent Gnome releases, I assumed it’s still there, but can be wrong…
The feature never existed upstream, in GNOME.
It was a downstream patch in Ubuntu, though. See: Bug 608402 – Add support for delaying autostart applications
Cinnamon must have forked Ubuntu’s patched version of gnome-session, rather than the upstream GNOME version. So, Cinnamon inherited the patch, and continues to have it to this day