Gnome option in the making
I’d just like to point out a good idea, that’s becoming a reality. GNOME has it’s own way of setting Preferences of the desktop environment, it’s the Preferences section in the Main menu. All the options can be found in number of small separate dialogs.
There is no “control center” you might say. I don’t find this idea that bad, but if you are a newcomer and you don’t know what you are looking for, it can be quite awkward. You need to navigate through menu several times, open and close a bunch of dialogs to find what you need.
Andrew Krause is about to change that. 
He is working an a project Gnome Option, check it out.
And Andrew, you should put a screen shot on you blog, so people can see what this is all about.