MATE-SESSION(1)

📦 version 1.28.0, in alpine 3.24, arch rolling, debian bookworm, debian trixie, epel 9, fedora 43, fedora 44, nixos 26.05, nixpkgs unstable, opensuse-leap 16.0, ubuntu jammy, ubuntu noble, ubuntu questing, ubuntu resolute, ubuntu stonking

💖 mate-session — bestie, it's time to start your whole desktop 💖

okay so picture this: you're sitting at your login screen, you type your password, and then — boom — a whole entire desktop materialises. that's this. mate-session is from the General Commands Manual, and it is the main character that boots the MATE Desktop Environment. sit down, grab a strawberry, we're doing this 🌸

✨ NAME ✨

mate-session — start the MATE Desktop Environment. that's it, that's the whole job, and it does it flawlessly 💅

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

mate-session [OPTIONS]

✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

so the mate-session program is literally the thing that starts up the MATE desktop environment. no cap. normally you never run it yourself — it gets executed by your Login/Display Manager (think GDM, LXDM, XDM, SLiM, or from your X startup scripts like .xinitrc). and when it runs, it loads either your saved session or it hands you a default session — the one your system administrator defined, or just the default MATE installation that's sitting on your system. either way you're covered 🫶

the default session is defined in the dconf keys under

/org/mate/desktop/session/

and when it's time to save a session, mate-session takes all your currently running applications and tucks them into the ~/.config/mate-session/saved-session directory inside the user's /home. iconic. your whole vibe, preserved ✨

also important: mate-session is an X11 session manager. so it can manage MATE applications and any other X11 SM compliant ones — it plays nice with everyone, we love a collaborator 👑

✨ OPTIONS ✨

the options it supports, bestie:

  • -a, --autostart=DIR — start all the applications defined in DIR, instead of starting the applications defined in /org/mate/desktop/session/default-session. and yes, you can pass multiple --autostart options. stack 'em, queen 🎀
  • -f, --failsafe — run in fail-safe mode. user-specified applications will not be started. it's giving "we're keeping this minimal on purpose" 💀
  • --debug — enable debugging code. for when you need to see everything 🔍
  • --display=DISPLAY — X display to use.
  • --version — output version information and exit. quick lil flex, then bye 👋
  • -?, -h, --help — print standard command line options.
  • --help-all — print all command line options. the full menu, no crumbs withheld 🍓

✨ ENVIRONMENT ✨

mate-session sets several environment variables for the use of its child processes:

  • SESSION_MANAGER — this variable is used by session-manager aware clients to contact mate-session. it's basically the group chat invite so everyone can find each other 💬
  • DISPLAY — this variable is set to the X display being used by mate-session. note: if the --display option is used, this might be different from the setting of the environment variable when mate-session was invoked. so like, keep an eye on that 👀

✨ FILES ✨

  • ~/.config/autostart
  • /usr/share/autostart
  • /usr/share/mate/autostart

the applications defined in the above directories will be started on login. and mate-session-properties(1) can be used to easily configure them — no manual file editing required, thank god 🙈

  • ~/.config/mate-session/saved-session

this directory contains the list of applications of the saved session. your little time capsule of open windows 📦

✨ BUGS ✨

should you encounter any bugs, they may be reported at:

http://github.com/mate-desktop/mate-session-manager/issues

please report them, bestie, the maintainers want to know 😭

✨ AUTHORS ✨

this manual page was originally written for gnome-session by:

  • Miguel de Icaza <miguel@helixcode.com> (2000)
  • Vincent Untz <vuntz@gnome.org> (2009-2010)

it has been updated for the MATE Desktop Environment by:

  • Adam Erdman <hekel@archlinux.info> (2014)

shoutout to the elders who wrote the docs so we wouldn't have to figure it out ourselves 🫡

✨ SEE ALSO ✨

further information may also be available at:

http://wiki.mate-desktop.org/docs

go read those too, iykyk 📚

and that's the whole page, bestie! this one came from the MATE Desktop Environment, dated 11 February 2014. it's been slaying since before some of us could read, and honestly? still iconic. go start a desktop, you've got this 💜🦋

📦 where this page comes from