Another solution would be to have a "Revert" button (similar to the one in Alacarte). That also allows you to quickly go back to the defaults if you totally stuffed something up (e.g. changed the name/command/comment of one of the defaults, or added an app that you don't like, or added something that breaks the session, etc).

Created attachment 96357 [details] [review]
add revert button

This patch adds a revert button. Pressing this button will ask for confirmation, and then delete all files in |~/.config/autostart| and then refresh the GUI.

If necessary, it could be changed to only delete .desktop files, or perhaps only delete files in the list, etc. but I thought I might keep it simple to start off with. :)

I don't think "revert" should mean deleting all files in ~/.config/autostart. This would be confusing in most cases, since you usually have files there that might be useful (eg, right now, I have at least 3 or 4 files for programs I added myself).

I think there might be a misunderstanding here. :) 

With the revert button I'm thinking along the lines of "Arghh, I've stuffed everything up, just get me back to default and then I can try to fix it". If you have added programs yourself, then clearly you know _how_ to add those programs, so if you do press revert then it's fairly easy to get back to where you were.

On the other hand, if you're a beginner and started messing around and removed something crucial (like gnome-volume-manager or update-notifier, etc), then it takes quite a bit of effort to figure out how to fix that. In this case, pressing revert is a much easier way of guaranteeing that all your terrible mistakes have been undone. :)

So it's meant to be "revert all changes, ever", not "revert all changes that I just made". 

So it should be called "Revert to defaults" :-)

This bug is more about the other "Revert", IMHO, and this other "Revert" is probably more important since that's what you usually might want to do.

(and really, we should make it so that people disable a startup program instead of removing it when they don't want it to start - I've the feeling that people might prefer removing them, which creates this issue)

Yes, the confirmation dialog box says "Revert startup programs to original settings?"

When you say 'other revert', do you mean 'revert all changes that I just made'? If so, I don't think that's very useful - if you delete something important without knowing what it was, you probably would not notice until the next time you tried to log in, which would be too late (since you would have closed the window).

Agreed on the disabling :)

Patch is obsolete due to new session-properties codebase.

Anybody have new opinions on my proposed solution? I might be able to cook up a new patch if anyone's interested. :)

IMO, the first fix is just to make it impossible to remove a system specified startup program ... disabling them is sufficient. If a user added a startup program themselves, they probably can figure out how to add it back. 

I also agree with the original reporter that a confirmation dialog on "Remove" is a good idea, it is a destructive operation.

Various schemes for "Revert" or "Undo" for dialogs have discussed by the UI guys but I don't think anything has been officially blessed. Going off and inventing something and spending a lot of time implementing it seems like unnecesary adventurism for a rather obscure dialog.

Yeah, I've been bitten by this too.  Owen's recommendations sound good to me.

is this bug 333670 rearing its ugly head again?

Not really ... deleting the system specified startup items works fine:  it writes out a file in the user's dir with hidden=true ... you just don't want to do it.

*** Bug 550894 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

*** Bug 557432 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

gnome-session-properties is no longer included in gnome-session.