KDE System Administration

This section provides system administrators who are rolling out new or managing existing KDE deployments in their organization with the information they need to do so effectively.

File System

Configuration File Syntax: KDE configuration files are text-based. They contain groups of key-value pairs. This section explains their syntax. It covers:

localization,
shell variables,
complete or partial lock-down of configuration files,
editor utilities,
other advanced features.

KDE Hierarchy: This article describes how KDE uses the filesystem, where it looks for files, and where it stores them. It explains how to change these locations. There is also a brief overview of the default settings used by major OS vendors.

XDG Hierarchy: Supplementing the KDE filesystem hierarchy, KDE also uses various directories, as defined by XDG specifications on freedesktop.org. This article documents the paths used and their purposes.

Desktop Sessions

Environment Variables: A variety of environment variables documented in this article are available to influence aspects of KDE and the runtime behavior of KDE applications.

Desktop Startup Sequence: During startup, KDE starts the visible desktop components as well as several services that run in the background. This article describes the startup sequence, gives an overview of some of the services started, and explains how to make changes to them.

Login Manager: The KDE Display Manager (KDM) provides services commonly associated with a login manager. The first contact your users have with a KDE system is usually the KDM login screen. This section covers the basics of setting up KDM, plus advanced topics such as remote login, automatic login, and more.

Plasma Desktop Scripting: The KDE Plasma Desktop provides means to manage the desktop shell (desktop, panels, widget) via scripts written in JavaScript. This article describes how to take advantage of this feature set and documents the full API.

Plasma Desktop Scripting: The Plasma Two and KF5 version of the desktop scripting tutorial

User & Group Profiles

Introduction to Kiosk: The Kiosk framework provides a set of features that allows to easily and powerfully restrict the capabilities of a KDE environment based on user and group credentials. In addition to an introductory overview, this article covers configuration setting lockdown, action and resource restrictions, assigning profiles to users and groups, and more.

Kiosk Keys: This document details known global and application-specific kiosk keys for action, resource and URL restrictions, making it a handy reference guide when setting up a Kiosk profile.

Additional Resources: Links to tools, mailing lists and additional documentation relevant to user and group profiles in KDE.

Tools

KioskTool: A graphical application that helps manage KDE Kiosk user and group profiles.

Desktop Sharing: The KDE Desktop Sharing capabilities make it possible to share your desktop remotely with others. Among other uses, this feature allows support staff to give direct assistance to users.

Using KDE Dialogs in Shell Scripts: You can use KDialog shell scripts to show various KDE dialogs. This gives you seamless integration of your own custom GUI enhancements.

Controlling Access to Content Provided By Get New Stuff: This section provides information on how to control content downloaded from the Internet by the Get New Stuff feature of KDE.

Unlock a user session: Your user session is locked out; perhaps it's a problem with the keyboard layout or an input device. If you are using Plasma 5, there is a solution for that. You can switch to a console TTY or login via ssh to run the following command loginctl unlock-sessions.