Emacs 27.1 init file not loading

[Skip Montanaro]

I recently switched from Ubuntu to XUbuntu and in the process lost
Emacs 27.2. The standard repo only had 26.3, so I went looking for
alternative locations and landed here:

https://launchpad.net/~kelleyk/+archive/ubuntu/emacs

That only had 27.1, but I figured "How different could it be?" As it
turns out, it's different in one pretty significant way. Running just
"emacs" from the command line, it fails to find/load
~/.config/emacs/init.el. If I run it like so:

emacs --load ~/.config/emacs/init.el

it does load. I can tell that it doesn't load in the normal case
because I added a couple calls to (message "...") to start and end the
file. They don't show in the minibuffer or the *Messages* buffer
unless I use the more explicit command.

For the time being I just created a symlink from ~/.emacs to
~/.config/emacs/init.el.

Is there a more-or-less standard place to find 27.2 for Debian-like
systems? I know I could download and build Emacs myself, but I'm
getting old and prefer to let the system take care of managing
dependencies and updates. For me the days of compiling and installing
Emacs (or the Linux kernel) on a daily or weekly basis are way in the
past.

Thanks,

Skip