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NB: I'm not talking about startup applications. I mean, how does the system know which applications to start as part of the Pantheon destkop, such as which panel, dock, etc.
I'm only seeing gala and gnome-settings-daemon in /usr/share/gnome-session/sessions/pantheon.session, so I figure it must be somewhere else.
Pantheon uses a component called Cerbere as a watchdog type service that launches and monitors the additional desktop components. By default, the processes it starts and monitors are: wingpanel, plank, and slingshot-launcher. These are configurable through dconf-editor or gsettings. Take a look at the monitored-processes property in the org.pantheon.desktop.cerbere schema.
gsettings get org.pantheon.desktop.cerbere monitored-processes
/etc/xdg/autostart. If for some reason you didn't want it to start, you could remove the desktop file: sudo rm -f /etc/xdg/autostart/cerbere.desktop. This would give you just a wallpaper when you login. To add it back run: sudo ln -s /usr/share/applications/cerbere.desktop /etc/xdg/autostart/cerbere.desktop
– Michael Mims
Aug 20 '15 at 12:49
