gconf
is deprecated, so for a new project I would not use it. dconf
is a backend for storing the settings, as an application developer you should normally not have to bother with it.
What you seem to need is gsettings
, a high-level API (API documentation for C) to store/retrieve settings without bothering how/where they are actually stored. gsettings
is part of gio
, which is one of the core packages of gnome (like glib
and gobject
). This blog post gives a short introduction how to use it with Python.
If you do not want any dependencies on gio
(e.g. you are not developing a GNOME application) and want to store simple config files, I'd suggest to use the $HOME/.config
directory (or whatever directory defined by $XDG_CONFIG_DIRS
) instead of $HOME/.your_appname
, in line with the freedesktop spec.