Autostart Linux Applications in One Command

Usually, when I am done working on the computer, I just suspend it. Thanks to that, I can easily pick up where I left off. But sometimes, I have to swallow the pill and turn it off (for example to preserve charge while traveling). In such cases, you can autostart Linux apps to quickly setup your work environment and get back to being productive. Fortunately, you can easily set this up in desktop environments adhering to Freedesktop standards. These include Gnome and KDE, among others. You just need to copy the .desktop files of your favorite programs from /usr/share/applications/ to the autostart directory. For instance your browser, password manager or a roll-down terminal. If you only want it to start for yourself, copy it to $HOME/.config/autostart. However, for system-wide configuration, the directory is /etc/xdg/autostart. As a result, you don’t have to waste time starting up the same 5 applications every time you reboot. And you can set everything up using just command line. So you can even use it is part of your computer installation script. If you are looking for other ways to automize tedious tasks, check out this guide to automatically configure your computer with Ansible.