Elias Mårtenson <lokedhs@gmail.com> writes:

> After checking all the obvious things, I remembered seeing something about supporting the
> XDG standards, and because of this I found a directory $HOME/.config/emacs. This directoriy
> contained a single file whose name I cannot remember. As far as I can rceall, this file was
> empty. I deleted this directory and restarted Emacs. At this point my init file was loaded
> correctly.

The confusion is gone after readin the NEWS outline file.