18.4. Application autostart
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### 18.4. Application autostart

Free Desktop standards autostart facility user `/etc/xdg/autostart` or `/usr/local/etc/xdg/autostart` to find system wide autostart entries, and user's own `$HOME/.config/autostart` to find and execute user's explicitly defined autostart entries. This ".desktop" files have "Desktop Entry" section where everything is defined to start the application. Applications autostarted in such way are usually applets and tray icons, or even background user-level daemons: that is, services, their controls and indicators mainly. Apart from XDG autostart facility, for ordinary screen oriented programs (but also other things possibly) NsCDE user it's own `$FVWM_USERDIR/Init.fvwmconf` where applications, their workspace, page, order and conditions can be programmed by the user to satisfy initial state of the environment upon successful login. Autostarter for XDG is also conditionally started from there.

If standalone freedesktop autostarter dex (sometimes called "dex-autostart") is installed, it will be used by `$FVWM_USERDIR/Init.fvwmconf` function `CommonInitFunction` in local mode: it will read and start ".desktop" files in the `$HOME/.config/autostart` directory.

In other words, NsCDE does not use, look or start anything from `/etc/xdg/autostart` or `/usr/local/etc/xdg/autostart`, or some other possible system XDG autostart directory. If user wants applications to be autostarted, they must be written, put or copied into it's own `$HOME/.config/autostart`. This is due to the fact there can be a plenty of unwanted applications, often put there by the default desktop environments of Linux distributions, default installations of non-user programs and such. In other words, user can "pick" from system's autostart, or symlink to that items wanted or needed for one's setup and usage.

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