How to get really rid of uninstalled Linux applications?

Question

I uninstalled docky, now I got this message in xsession errors:

cinnamon-session[2256]: WARNING: Failed to start app: Unable to start application: Failed to execute child process "docky" (No such file or directory)

Any idea how to get rid of that?

Answer 1

I just tried installing docky and setting it to automatically start. I found that docky achieves this by writing a file called docky.desktop in the autostart directory $XDG_CONFIG_DIRS/autostart, which usually translates to ~/.config/autostart/.

This directory is defined by the Desktop Application Autostart Specification, which defines a method for automatically starting applications during the startup of a desktop environment.

This file is created by docky when autostart is enabled. In other words, it's created at runtime and thus not managed by package managers. So it doesn't get deleted when the package gets uninstalled.

By removing ~/.config/autostart/docky.desktop manually, you will probably get rid of this message.