On the Fediverse a while back, I said :
Ah yes, GNOME, it is of course my mistake that I used gconf-editor instead of dconf-editor. But at least now Gnome-Terminal no longer intercepts F11, so I can possibly use g-t to enter F11 into serial consoles to get the attention of a BIOS. If everything works in UEFI land.
Gnome has had at least two settings systems, GSettings / dconf ( also ) and the older GConf . If you're using a modern Gnome program, especially a standard Gnome program like gnome-terminal, it will use GSettings and you will want to use
dconf-editor
to modify its settings outside of whatever Preferences dialogs it gives you (or doesn't give you). You can also use the gsettings or dconf programs from the command line.
(This can include Gnome-derived desktop environments like Cinnamon , which has updated to using GSettings .)
If the program you're using hasn't been updated to the latest things that Gnome is doing, for example Thunderbird (at least as of 2024), then it will still be using GConf . You need to edit its settings using
gconf-editor
or
gconftool-2
, or possibly you'll need to look at the GConf version of general Gnome settings. I don't know if there's anything in Gnome that synchronizes general Gnome GSettings settings into GConf settings for programs that haven't yet been updated.
(This is relevant for programs, like Thunderbird , that use general Gnome settings for things like 'how to open a particular sort of thing'. Although I think modern Gnome may not have very many settings for this because it always goes to the GTK GIO system , based on the Arch Wiki's page on Default Applications .)
Because I've made this mistake between gconf-editor and dconf-editor more than once, I've now created a personal gconf-editor cover script that prints an explanation of the situation when I run it without a special --really argument. Hopefully this will keep me sorted out the next time I run gconf-editor instead of dconf-editor.
PS: Probably I want to use gsettings instead of dconf-editor and dconf as much as possible, since gsettings works through the GSettings layer and so apparently has more safety checks than dconf-editor and dconf do.
PPS: Don't ask me what the equivalents are for KDE. KDE settings are currently opaque to me .