Navigation on KDE
 

I feel very stupid, 20 years ago I was a Unix 5 system admin at a Xerox plant using Sun systems and then Database admin at American Airline for Dec and HP versions of Unix. I have just brought up PCLinuxOS running from the DVD on a laptop and I could not even figure out how to shut down the system without tuning off the power. Any ideas of a good guide?

There are plenty of tutorials about kde on youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zpdjySiS88

KDE has a icon in the exact same spot as the MS [START] button

it is called "kickoff"
and is in the lower left corner just like [start]

and dose the same thing
it is a menu

To shutdown from within KDE, click the "Leave" item. It will present you with choices to log out, reboot, etc.

In any desktop environment or window manager, you can also open a terminal and, as root, issue the command