Comment 14 for bug 818864

The old .Xsession / .xinitrc feature is something that has worked
consistently for 15+ years on a variety of unixes, so I was
pretty surprised to find such an established behavior removed.

Each time I upgrade Ubuntu, I have to fix more and more things to
get my system working as well as it did before the upgrade. This
is one more item on my list of bugs to work around. However,
giving lightdm a desktop file for Xsession would reduce my
upgrade-fix list at least a little.

For me, the symptom was that when I tried to log in after
upgrade, lightdm authorized me, gave me a blank desktop for about
one second, then went back to the login screen. No files in my
home directory (such as .xsession-errors) were updated, and no
logs in /var/log/ contained any hint of what was wrong. I had to
guess what the problem was, test a few hypotheses, then research
it online for a fix. It's worth noting that choosing the login
option for my chosen window manager does *not* produce a suitable
session, and that this is not a bug in the window manager.

If this isn't going to be fixed, I suppose I can always go back
to putting 'exit 0' at the beginning of /etc/init.d/*dm and
running 'startx' manually from a VT. That would probably buy me
a few more years of not having to worry about the constant churn
in UI fads.