Ubuntu 14.04: don't touch those buttons!
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:
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).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!
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.
I think its a terrible idea, and a waste of time and effort. If you are creating something new from scratch, then by all means limit the number of ways of doing things. But don't do it to a project that's already in the wild.
While I switched off Ubuntu years before Unity existed for trivial reasons ( didn't like my DVD drive), these kinds of changes keep me from switching back, despite the widespread adoption.