To the original question, I think there is nothing better than editing files by hand when it comes to configuring things. This is one of the powerful things about the unix (and Linux). Convenience, like using GUIs, comes at a price, and you are relying on somebody else's idea of convenience, robustness and more importantly security. Never take my advise, but it is to learn to do everything properly and from the command-line. Keep unix unix and thank me later. There are many books on the subject. Get one and start reading and keep it as a reference. If you want a quick start within the next few minutes, here is your freebie: http://tldp.org/LDP/sag/sag.pdf The kernel has received updates, and several more daemons and other system related components have been added to Linux, and many more so on the more bleeding edge distributions. So, expect that you will have to stay up-to-date and that it is a moving target. (I do remember the day that "shadow" passwords were added to prevent hashed ones from being visible to common users.) As for high-resolution timers, it is not like anything has really changed in terms of using them and programming with them. The manual page Rick mentioned is here: http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7/time.7.html It states that the _first_ update to jiffes was done by increasing the timer's resolution by a lot, and then shortly after was given several possible modes of operation, with multimedia applications in mind. But the high resolution timers were added later, and in my mind they are in support of more time critical applications, like real-time systems that perform data acquisition for experiments and other real-life equipment. There is nothing crazy about using HRTs in programming. How about something like clock_gettime() and so on? Here is an extract from the man pages from my system (slackware 14.1): #include <time.h> int clock_getres(clockid_t clk_id, struct timespec *res); int clock_gettime(clockid_t clk_id, struct timespec *tp); int clock_settime(clockid_t clk_id, const struct timespec *tp); Nothing more bare-bones thant <time.h> in my opinion... The gospel by Robert Love is what I use for a linux system programming reference book: Love, Robert, "Linux System Programming," 2nd, Ed., O'Reily, 2013. I love that book.