System Settings in KDE

For most of its life, Linux has had a reputation as difficult to configure. Or, perhaps more accurately, easy to configure if you could find the right configuration file. That’s become an increasingly irrelevant point with current distributions, as evidenced by the flexibility of the KDE Control Center.

You’ll find the KDE Control Center in the task bar, with an icon that looks like a monitor behind a PCI card. Within the Control Center, you’ll find settings that no one would have expected to be in a Linux GUI just a few years ago. These include some standard settings; Look and Feel, Personalization and Sound. There are also, buried within this tool, some critical system settings.

Via the Control Center interface, KDE allows a user to modify settings that are at the heart of a machine - the “System” settings. These the include boot manager and kernel configuration. If you’re not logged in as root (which you shouldn’t be) you’ll be prompted for the root password. For the boot manager configuration, you’ll need to click the “Modify” button in order to be prompted for the root password. Once there, you can modify every element of the boot manager, directly from the GUI. The same approach works for the kernel configuration.

The KDE Control Center also allows you to adjust your system date and time, customize your console windows, change the appearance and behavior of your login screen, add and configure printers, and change the properties of the session manager.

By allowing GUI configuration in these areas, KDE has moved those mysterious system settings into the realm of the usable for all new Linux users.