Raiden's Realm: The KDE 4.3 System Settings - Part 1

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The KDE 4.3 System Settings - Part 1 - Introduction + Look & Feel (Page 1 of 6)

Written by Steve Lake
Posted on: Feb 01, 2010 at 02:34pm
Section: Tutorials
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In our original article two years ago, we did a complete overview of the entire KDE 3.5 Control Center, a task that was not small by any stretch of the imagination. But since so many of you felt that it was unbelievably helpful to you, as well as instrumental in instructing new users on the usage of KDE in Linux, I've decided to go ahead with a new series, this time detailing the new System Settings control panel for KDE4.

The reason I'm doing this now, and I hadn't done it before this, is because I wanted to wait until KDE4 grew and matured enough to make this worth doing. I believe it's reached that point with KDE 4.3. It may still have some growing to do, but the new System Settings panel (the replacement for Control Center) is more or less finalized, allowing for articles such as this to be written without concern for too many changes or obsolescing of features in the meantime as it continues to mature.

So, with that said, let's move on to looking over the new System Settings panel. First off, System Settings, like KDE4 itself, has both a new and a classic layout. As much as I prefer the classic menu in KDE4, I prefer the new layout for the System Settings panel, as it lends itself to much easier, and more readily comprehensible navigation.

The new panel, in its new configuration, is broken into two main sections. Namely, General and Advanced. General is all of the things that are your day to day standard configuration options. Advanced contains, well, the more advanced features you're not likely to touch more than once or twice a year, if at all. This simple separation of categories and sections really makes the System Settings panel much easier to work with.

So lets move on from here and begin to look at each one, and what they offer. Also, do note that all configuration windows have "Help", "Defaults", "Reset" and "Apply" buttons at the bottom to allow you to open the help dialog, switch everything to KDE4 defaults, reset the window to what it was before you started tinkering, and apply whatever changes you've been working on. There's also a button at the top of the section list that will allow you to go back to the overview page.