Day-to-day system management on Unix systems is a chore. Even when
you're using a friendly graphical desktop, seemingly basic tasks like
setting the system time, changing the network setup, importing and
exporting network shared filesystems and configuring swap partitions
requires editing configuration files by hand, and the exact procedure
varies between different operating systems and distributions.
The GNOME System Tools solve all these problems, giving you a simple
graphical interface for each task, which uses an advanced backend to
edit all the relevant files and apply your changes. The interface
looks and acts in exactly the same way regardless of what platform
you're using.