Colin Watson wrote:
To my knowledge, startx has only ever used .xinitrc, not .xsession ... I don't know why it used to work. Maybe you had a symlink in place at one point?
man startx: [...] Note that in the Debian system, what many people traditionally put in the .xinitrc file should go in .xsession instead; this permits the same X environment to be presented whether startx, xdm, or xinit is used to start the X session. All discussion of the .xinitrc file in the xinit(1) manual page applies equally well to .xsession. Keep in mind that .xinitrc is used only by xinit(1) and completely ignored by xdm(1).