Purpose of the autostart-scripts directory
A user can place .desktop files in his ~/.config/autostart/ directory to run a
script on login (session start) in Gnome, or indeed any Freedesktop-compliant
environment.

But, on my openSUSE Leap 42.2 Gnome 3 system, in addition to each user's
~/.config/autostart/ directory, each user also has a ~/.config/autostart
-scripts/ directory. I would assume that this directory would serve as a
dumping ground for any quick and dirty scripts that a user would want to run
on login without having to wrap those scripts in a .desktop file, but the
scripts I place in that directory do not run on login.

Search engines have provided very little in the way of details about this
directory. Does anyone know the purpose of the ~/.config/autostart-scripts
directory and the requirements for the scripts in it to run?

Glad that I'm not the only one wondering about this cryptic directory.
Obviously your synopsis per the Freedesktop spec for the autostart directory
is straight from the Freedesktop docs; and as for autostart-scripts, KDE
Plasma 5 behaves exactly as you assume: it executes any executables in that
directory. Not knowing much about GNOME 3, I don't know why it didn't "work"
(what does "work" really even mean here?) for you there, but Plasma 5
observes that behavior. – villapx
    Jan 7, 2019 at 21:29
Indeed, Plasma 5 has autostart-scripts hardcoded in its source (along
with plasma-workspace/shutdown and plasma-workspace/env): here it is on
GitHub. Googling this directory name yields absolutely nothing, though, so
it's not part of any standard. I assume the KDE folks just chose it kind of
arbitrarily – villapx
    Jan 7, 2019 at 21:40 



Answer 1

Because (as user villapx discovered) KDE Plasma 5 has this autostart-scripts
directory in its source, I am assuming that it is an undocumented feature of
Plasma 5 and that I was running this profile under KDE at one point.

I was able to tweak my system for other Desktop Environments to make it work
as I believe KDE uses it. To do this, I added a system autostart Desktop file
at /etc/xdg/autostart/exec-autostart:
	[Desktop Entry]
Exec=autostart-exec.sh
Icon=system-run
NotShowIn=KDE
Terminal=false
TerminalOptions=
Type=Application

This referenced a script that would call each script in the autostart
-scripts directory (using the directory determination from the Autostart
spec):
	#!/bin/sh
shopt -s nullglob # Ensure shell expansion with 0 files expands to an empty
list, rather than trying to read the "*.sh" file

if [ -z "$XDG_CONFIG_HOME" ]; then
    XDG_CONFIG_HOME=~/.config
fi
for f in "$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/autostart-scripts/"*.sh; do
    test -x "$f" && . "$f" || true
done



Answer 2
I'm adding some extra information here for general googlers on this dir.. It
seems KDE changed the workings of this dir in 2021 (without telling people
widely, much to the ire of some), and "unilaterally" moved this dir to 'old
-autostart-scripts'. Then a .desktop file was created in
/home/user/.config/autostarts dir for each script."

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=436439 old bug report
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=267220 discussion
https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-workspace/-/merge_requests/736
official statement:


Currently the scripts inside of $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/autostart-scripts are
not run in systemd mode (https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=433987). This
PR migrates them to simple .desktop files inside of 
XDG_CONFIG_HOME/autostart so that they can be handled in both classic and
systemd boot mode. This way they can also be seen by other desktop
environments (autostart-scripts was a kde-only feature). And you can even
define login scripts at the system level thanks to the xdg config hierarchy
The migration will create a corresponding .desktop file for each existing
login script. If the login script was a symlink, it will be deleted and the
.desktop file will point to the source. The KCM is also updated to use this
new format. Login scripts are still visible as such (using a kde service
type to distinguish them). Instead of creating a symlink to
$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/autostart-scripts, adding a new script now creates a
.desktop file in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/autostart This also separates pre-startup
(env) scripts from login scripts in the UI. They were previously supported
but merged in the same category.

It seems to be automatically moving files still in 2023.