I'm sorry about the griping. It's just I've been trying like 10 different methods and none of them have worked properly. In Windows you just place it in a startup folder and that's it. In Linux mint you just add it to "Startup applications". I don't really understand why it needs to be hard. I've also been having trouble scripting in Linux in general.It's not hard, but Linux provides several ways to start scripts depending on what you actually want to do.There is seemingly no official answer, everyone each has their own opinion and even the stickied way has been deprecated! About that last one, why is there a separate zip for something that is so simple on other OSs? That's including other distros. That just shows you how unnecessarily complicated this is. All I've been trying to do is start a script (.sh) in a terminal and every method I've tried either doesn't work, or it causes issues. For example, adding a line to the end of bash.rc causes the script to run every time a terminal is open, probably because that script is for the terminal. Adding the file to autostart folders or as "@lxterminal -e /path/to/script.sh" to global/local autostart files DOES NOTHING!
Why is this so hard? Why does none of the autostart ways work and what's the actual (but highly likely to be convoluted, again) way to do it?
Perhaps if you stated your problem as "How do I start a script that does X, Y, and Z" rather than griping, with no details, we could provide you with a specific response.
Also, forum user thagrol created an excellent guide that you may find helpful: https://github.com/thagrol/Guides/blob/main/boot.pdf
All I've been trying to do is launch a terminal with a specific script after Raspberry Pi OS reaches the desktop. The most recent thing I've tried is crontab but that didn't work at all:
@reboot lxterminal -e /home/path/to/script.sh <---- there's no spaces in the actual path
In the script though, there is this command:
cd "home/desktop/directory with space"
Running "lxterminal -e /home/path/to/script.sh" in a terminal manually properly opens a new window, but the script fails cause it doesn't use the quotes in the above cd command, leading to errors on future lines.
Statistics: Posted by treytest — Tue Dec 23, 2025 12:00 am