this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2026
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You can't to the same degree. If you let the user use a typical desktop environment like gnome or plasma., then they can set their wallpaper.
Now if you want to make a kiosk thing, so much easier in Linux. But if you want to have a general purpose desktop experience but restrict stupid stuff like wallpaper, windows has got you.
I would rather use and administer Linux systems at scale any day, but if you hated your users and wanted to lock personalization, then Windows has done the work to enable that.
Sorry, ma dude. This is 100% incorrect. Been doing this a long time, and have managed massive numbers of desktop sessions for enterprise end users.
Lookup
dconf. It's the tool that manages the underlying configuration engine for Gnome specifically.Outside of the granularity there, you could also just lock everything to a group and exclude logged in users from that group. That's a very simplistic way of explaining it, but achieves the exact same thing. You build a base image with only the apps the user needs, set execution to an inclusive group that user belongs to, and everything else to some other groups, and there you go. Dead simple.
Of course that's not how you'd do it for an org with thousands of users, but you get the point.