Ubuntu 14.04: don't touch those buttons!

by
in linux on (#3K1)
Ubuntu keeps working on optimizations of its controversial UI, and they haven't all been equally liked. This one, too, is sure to cause some controversy: They've removed the ability to choose whether the buttons go on the left or right side of a window .

That's not necessarily an option that everyone cares about, but those who do, care strongly about the now-removed feature. From the AskUbuntu forum:
It seems that Canonical went the totalitarian way and ordered that users should not be allowed to change the buttons position (you can find more technical details of this change on the bottom of this post).
As for now the only way to have windows buttons on the right side in 14.04 is to switch from Unity to the Gnome Flashback session (what I personally recommend). More details on how to do that are presented below.
That is, the days of being able to make this personalization to your config, once easily handled either via the gconf-editor command line tool, or the equally comfortable command: gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.wm.preferences button-layout ":minimize,maximize,close" have drawn to a close. Hope you like Ubuntu's choices, everyone: they're the only choices you get!

Re: Not the only choice (Score: 1)

by cykros@pipedot.org on 2014-05-07 14:25 (#1F1)

Also worth noting, just in case we have some nooblings around here in the dark, is that you don't NEED to have a version of ubuntu packaged with another window manager/desktop environment to use one; it's as simple as "sudo apt-get install ". I almost appreciate Canonical being this locked down with their default environment, as given how much they've done to discourage people needing to learn a thing or two to use GNU/Linux at all, it's nice to see them now encouraging people to learn a thing or two because the defaults, while functional, get uncomfortable fairly quickly. And if you don't want to learn, well, you still have a working system and won't be running back to Windows because the learning curve was too high.

Not as system I'll personally be using in the near future, but it does seem to have some pluses to it for its target userbase.
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