Hardware: Acer TravelMate P2410
OS: Xubuntu 18.10
Running on xfce4, version 4.12, with Thunar, version 1.8.1

On several other desktops environments, I have been using the save session functionality of xfce to recover my work between shutdowns, especially Thunar for remembering on which project I am working. With my new laptop, installing Xubuntu, the problem begins. Saving sessions work well for other applications, but not Thunar. In Settings -- Sessions and Startup, if I look at the "Session" Tab, Thunar is never there, even if I opened several directories using it. Then on startup, none of the directories opened in a previous session appears. I have had a peek into ~/.cache/sessions. There is no file starting with "Thunar", which is not the case for my other desktops.

Attempts to fix it reveils that it is probably a problem in Thunar, failing to write its status to, and to restart from, files written in ~/.cache/sessions, at least in my case.

Obviously, cleaning the cache in ~/.cache/sessions does not work. Also xfwm4 is running after startup. Everything is the same for shutdown instead of logout.

First, after startup, there is a "Thunar --daemon" running, and after a bit of tracking, it was started by systemd upon request of xfdesktop. This instance writes nothing in ~/.cache/sessions.

Second, when the "Thunar --daemon" from startup is killed, opening an arbitrary directory give rise to another Thunar daemon instance, which correctly writes information into ~/.cache/sessions, and also appears in the "Session" Tab of Settings -- Sessions and Startup. However, if I log out and log back in, the opened directories are still not there, and we are back to the Thunar daemon from systemd. I checked that the files in ~/.cache/sessions are clearly intact between the logout/login using another tty without X.

Therefore, the conclusion seems to be that, somehow on my computer, the Thunar daemon started by systemd does not work well with session management.

This does not seem to be related to Bug 14509, since there is no coredump for Thunar.

The laptop is new, and Xubuntu was installed without special options. If there is anything that may be a problem, it would be that I somehow managed to screw my home directory to be owned by the root when switching from ext3 to ext4, but I fixed it myself by chown -R. I mention this because it may also well be a problem of permission, but when I check, ~/.cache/sessions is well owned by me with the usual 664 permission on all files in it.