I'd like to globally override some settings in KWin, e. g. default window decoration, window control buttons position (place all them on the left like in Mac|Unity|GNOME3) and so on.
Appropriate settings are located in kwinrc file (in /etc/kde4/share/config/ for openSUSE). But when I change them, add the file to SUSE Studio appliance, build it and launch test run, kwinrc is recreated and only contains info about some visual effects, but nothing about window deco etc. If I add the info to it and relogin, system appearence changes to the expected one, but that cannot be kept in OS image.

So explain me please, is that a KDE or SUSE Studio issue? Maybe kwinrc should be formed via scripting like plasma-desktop appearence settings?

Please don't advice to use /etc/skel if there are less "dirty" ways to solve the problem exist.

P. S. Happy New Year to everybody!

What kwinrc is recreated?
The global one in /etc?

luebking, yes, the global one.

SuSE Studio then - kwin does not come with a global kwinrc.
It's likely created from /etc/sysconfig/* but I don't know (yet yast maintains kinda all config from there and iirc one's strongly advised to not edit upstream config files directly, like yast writes a warning into the files or so)

Ok, then what is the way to change these KDE default settings in common case? (NOT openSUSE-only).

Alter the coded defaults or (as you tried) provide a global config file, the global config dir is part of:

kde4-config --path config

You can also place the settings in kdeglobals, but they will be shadowed by the resp. kwinrc.
Paths early in "kde4-config --path config" trump paths late in it and kwinrc trumps the matching kdeglobals.

If however your changes are just overridden when creating the image, that won't help you.
Maybe it's sufficient to make the files immutable

sudo chattr +i /etc/kde4/share/config/kwinrc

(the file can no longer be altered or removed as long as the attribute is set!)

Be aware that this only holds depending on how the config file is opened:
http://api.kde.org/4.x-api/kdelibs-apid ... 2596d15f7e

In particular the rules will ignore configurations in kdeglobals

Thank you, the variant with storing settings in kdeglobals seems to work fine.