How-To: Automatically Run Applications at KDE Start-Up

In this tutorial I’ll show you how to automatically fire up any program or command when KDE starts up. You can create your own launchers (desktop files) to be ran or even Bash scripts with commands to be executed. KDE has a special directory in which launchers which should be executed are placed. This directory is $HOME/.kde/Autostart by default. You can change this inside the KDE System Settings by going to Account Details and clicking on the Paths tab. Although normally you don’t need to change this, see the screenshot below if you want to set another folder as your KDE start-up folder: path So, the simplest way to include start-up applications is to manually add the launchers or scripts inside this directory. For example, you can create an application launcher, which actually is a desktop file, then copy the file inside the Autostart directory. If your application is, say, Wesnoth, the launcher may look something like this: #!/usr/bin/env xdg-open [Desktop Entry] Name=Battle for Wesnoth GenericName=Turn-Based Strategy Type=Application Exec=wesnoth Icon=wesnoth.png A tutorial on how to create desktop files can be found here.