Autostarting Nautilus Files, a file manger for GNOME, on fedora-38, fedora-37, or debian-11 based AppVM no longer works.
What used to work was copying the org.gnome.Nautilus.desktop file from /usr/share/applications to ~/.config/autostart but after moving into fedora-37 sometime ago it doesn’t work anymore.
Anyone got any ideas to make this automatically startup when an AppVM turns on?
Found the solution. It was too simple to ask even but here it goes.
cp /usr/share/applications/qubes-open-file-manager.desktop ~/.config/autostart
Hello,
Thank you for pointing out the qubes-open-file-manager.desktop solution.
I would, however, really like to understand why the *.desktop files that reside in /usr/share/applications/ not work when moved or linked to $HOME/.config/autostart.
I have variously read up on this on the web and experimented with changing permissions, as well as introducing a leading #!/usr/bin/env xdg-open line into copied *.desktop files - all to no avail.
This works fine for me, I just tried it.
mkdir -p ~/.config/autostart
ln -s /usr/share/applications/something.desktop ~/.config/autostart
Restart the qube and it will start “something.desktop”
It works indeed for many *.desktop files , but NOT for the shipped gnome ones.
Pray try
mkdir -p ~/.config/autostart
ln -s /usr/share/applications/org.gnome.Nautilus.org.desktop ~/.config/autostart
and let me know whether this works for you - along with the template used… I’m on fedora-38.
On fedora-38, with ln -s /usr/share/applications/org.gnome.Calculator.desktop ~/.config/autostart/, I have the calculator starting with the qube
That doesn’t work with org.gnome.Nautilus.org.desktop though, but it’s a special case IMO as it’s also responsible for other stuff and not only the file browsing window 
Setting DBusActivatable to false in the .desktop file make it works at startup.
Thank you! Cool this is.