Want your favourite app to start automatically when you log in to Ubuntu? You’d normally open the the Startup Applications tool, but in Ubuntu 25.10 it’s no longer there.
Ubuntu 25.10 ships with GNOME 49, and a new version of the gnome-session package. This is what had provided the GUI startup applications tool, making it easy to add custom commands, launch scripts, and daemons and so on on each time you login.
But GNOME 49 makes (many) changes to how sessions are handled, along with deeper systemd integration, and the gnome-startup-applications frontend has been dropped from Ubuntu 25.10 as a result of the upgrade.
Of course, a frontend being gone doesn’t mean the ability to autostart apps on Ubuntu is.
End users who need an app to open at launch can manage autostart apps on from Settings. Open it, go to the Applications panel, select the app you want to start (or stop) from running at login and slide the ‘Autostart’ toggle on (or off).
I’ve no idea how many Ubuntu users make use of Startup Applications (upstream GNOME had been pointing people to GNOME Tweaks), not how many will even notice the tool is gone — somewhere near “not many” would be my guess.
Though this tool has long been a useful way to autostart apps on Ubuntu (for as long as I can remember), adding a toggle on app pages in Settings is a more logical approach, and should cover the majority of use cases.
The old Startup Applications tool was more flexible since it was possible to add custom commands, point to scripts, run daemons or add flags/arguments to GUI launchers (e.g., to run them silently). GUI means to do those tasks isn’t readily available in Ubuntu 25.10.
But if you can’t find startup applications in Ubuntu 25.10 and you were wondering where it went (or how to get it back as you can’t run sudo apt install gnome-startup-applications), at least you know why.