Specification

Tomboy and the desktop IM client (Empathy, Pidgin, etc.) should autostart after being launched.

Implementation

These programs should write a .desktop file to ~/.config/autostart if they are executed via the menu. If the user explicitly chooses "Quit", remove the file.

Is that it?

Or, "why just those two?". Admittedly, there isn't a clear-cut line to what programs should behave this way, and which should not. Here is an attempt at some guidelines:

• Would the program make sense under "Add to panel..."? In other words, is it written as a notification icon instead of a panel applet primarily because this allows it to work in other desktop environments?
• Do you expect the majority of users to have it open the entire time they're using the computer?
• Do similar programs in other desktop environments behave this way?

Outstanding issues

How will this interact with systems that ship e.g. Tomboy as started by default? If we still wanted the Quit menu to work above, we'd need a way actually for programs to anti-autostart.

• You can't solve this problem in the app-writes-to-~/.config/autostart scheme. See the discussion under Autostart-Condition here. I think the plan suggested there is a better idea (and is what KDE has been doing for years). And LucasRocha is already working on getting it working in gnome-session for GNOME 2.22, as suggested here (although with X-GNOME-Autostart-Condition rather than just Autostart-Condition). -- DanWinship

Further reading

See SessionManagement for more information about session work.