How do I add applications to the &kde; panel (&kicker;)? There are several ways to add an application to the panel, of which the easiest is to right-click on the panel, and from the context menu which appears, select Panel MenuAdd to PanelApplication Button and then the application for which you want to add a link. For more ways of adding buttons to the panel, refer to the &kicker; Handbook. Is it possible to change the K button of the panel to another picture? The simplest way is to download a new icon theme with a &kmenu; icon you prefer from http://www.kde-look.org and install it using the &kcontrolcenter;. In order to change only the &kmenu; icon you can overwrite the kmenu.png image for every size in an icon theme set. So, for &kde; default icons this would be $KDEDIR/share/icons/default.kde/size/apps/kmenu.png, where size is one of the sizes included in the &kde; icon theme. After an upgrade my &kmenu; appears to be empty! How can I get my menu back? In &kde; 3.2 and later local modifications to the &kmenu; are stored in $HOME/.config/menus/applications-kmenuedit.menu . Try moving this file out of the way and then issuing the command kbuildsycoca --noincremental. This should restore you to the default system menus. My desktop panel has disappeared. How can I get it back? The panel disappearing is usually due to it crashing. This is most often caused by loading an applet that has a fatal bug or due to a bad installation of &kde; and/or the panel. The easiest way to get the panel back is to launch the Run Command window by pressing &Alt;F2 and entering kicker and then pressing the OK button. If the panel continues to disappear, you may wish to either remove or edit by hand your $KDEHOME/share/config/kickerrc file, where $KDEHOME is usually ~/.kde. If you choose to edit it by hand, start by removing the applet entry groups. Where did the Icon Zooming option that used to be in &kicker; go? Icon zooming was not actively maintained and had caused severe bugs and usability issues. It was replaced in &kde; 3.4 by the new mouse over effects, which combine esthetics with useful information. How can I start an application minimized to the system tray? Use ksystraycmd. For example, to start a &konsole; hidden in the system tray, run ksystraycmd --hidden konsole. For more information about ksystraycmd, see the section Advanced Window Management in the &kde; User Guide. How do I use the &Windows; key to open the &kmenu;? Previous versions of &kde; provided a trick to allow you to use the &Windows; key both as a modifier (so you could have shortcuts like WinR ), and as a regular key (so that pressing Win on its own could open the &kmenu;). This feature was removed for reasons of usability and accessibility, as well as keeping the code clean. For current versions of &kde;, you have two options: either use a different shortcut to open the &kmenu; (the default is &Alt;F1 ), or remap the Win key to be a regular key, rather than a modifier. If you choose to do the second, here's one way: Find the keycode for your Win key using xev: Run the command xev in a &konsole;, and press the Win key. Look in the output of xev for keycode n, where n is the keycode of the Win key. Use xmodmap to remap the Win key. An appropriate command is xmodmap -e 'keycode n=Menu'. In the &kcontrolcenter;, go to Regional & AccessibilityKeyboard Shortcuts and set the shortcut for Popup Launch Menu to the Win key. You should now be able to popup the &kmenu; by pressing the Win key. One more step is required to save the changes across settings: Create a file ~/.kde/env/win-key.sh (create the directory if it doesn't exist), and add the xmodmap command you used previously to it. The change should now be applied every time you start &kde;.