13.7 Further Startup Topics
Because this book deals only with the underlying Linux system, we won’t cover windowing environment startup files. This is a large issue indeed, because the display manager that logs you in to a modern Linux system has its own set of startup files, such as .xsession, .xinitrc, and the endless combinations of GNOME- and KDE-related items.
The windowing choices may seem bewildering, and there is no one common way to start a windowing environment in Linux. The next chapter describes some of the many possibilities. However, when you determine what your system does, you might get a little carried away with the files that relate to your graphical environment. That’s fine, but don’t carry it over to new users. The same tenet of keeping things simple in shell startup files works wonders for GUI startup files, too. In fact, you probably don’t need to change your GUI startup files at all.