Panels and Menus

Panels and menus are your desktop palettes that hold icons and links to programs and files. Without panels and menus, you would just have a pretty desktop picture and nowhere to go. Every operating system and desktop environment may style their panels and menus differently, but the common function makes them easy to recognize. KDE and GNOME handle these important widgets in a similar manner.

KDE

The KDE desktop environment (see Figure 2.3) gets alternately praised and critiqued for its similarity to the Windows desktop. There are similar concepts insofar as there are windows, a taskbar type of object, and desktop icons, but KDE is its own creature with its own complexities. Let's look at the basic components of your KDE desktop, ...

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