How can I edit my Startup Applications in Gnome?

[tiefling]

I’ve just come from Ubuntu and there there is a GUI app called “Startup Applications” where you can configure what apps and scripts run on OS startup. Is there an equivalent for Manjaro? If not where is this configured so that I can edit it? (I assume the app effectively just wraps a config file somewhere)

I had a couple of apps (Dropbox & Insync) configured with quite convoluted delay and kick scripts in Ubuntu in order to make them work but the Manjaro boot sequence seems a lot more brisk so I’m not sure I need them anymore so I want to experiment with removing some of these and adding the apps back directly instead.

[Falav]

Launch tweaks, you’ll find the applications launched at startup.

[tiefling]

This looks familiar but it’s slightly different. In Ubuntu I could add scripts in here but with this tool I can only add Applications.

Is there a different process for scripts?

I currently have 2 scripts in the list - I can remove them but may need to add them back in later.

[tiefling]

Digging further, after finding an explanatory article on how the Ubuntu app works, it looks like when you add something it creates a .desktop file in…

~/.config/autostart/

Looking in here my current scripts are set up with files like this…

restart-insync.desktop

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Exec=/home/keith/.startup/restart-insync.sh
Hidden=false
NoDisplay=false
X-GNOME-Autostart-enabled=true
Name[en_GB]=Restart Insync
Name=Restart Insync
Comment[en_GB]=
Comment=

start-delayed-dropbox.desktop

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Exec=/home/keith/.startup/start-delayed-dropbox.sh
Hidden=false
NoDisplay=false
X-GNOME-Autostart-enabled=true
Name[en_GB]=Dropbox (delayed)
Name=Dropbox (delayed)
Comment[en_GB]=
Comment=

What was doubly interesting (in my case) is that if I look at (for example) the standard Insync launch file it looks like this…

[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Type=Application
Name=Insync
GenericName=Insync
Comment=Launch Insync
Icon=insync
Categories=Network;
Exec=insync start
TryExec=insync
Terminal=false
X-GNOME-Autostart-Delay=3

X-GNOME-Autostart-Delay is interesting - I wonder if changing this manually may be a better solution than my (very convoluted) batch scripts.

[Hanzel]

@tiefling

X-GNOME-Autostart-Delay is interesting - I wonder if changing this manually may be a better solution than my (very convoluted) batch scripts.

I’ve never got this option to work correctly, just tried again and a delay value of 60 does not make the test application i used start 60 seconds later.

[tiefling]

@Hanzel - I found the same. I trialed that but it did nothing useful that I could see so I added the launch script back in with the sleep from before - Manjaro seems to need far less delays than Ubuntu did but still some.

Dropbox runs fine on Manjaro and doesn’t need the delay script but Insync is… Problematic - that’s a long story involving a horribly convoluted launch script.