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.
Still, I regularly check out other distros, and gave the new Ubuntu a spin today.
Guess what? I'm back into Mint again.
For me part of what I like about Linux is the feeling that I'm in control, and can tweak stuff to suit my specific needs. I really don't get that feeling with Ubuntu.
Instead it just feels like Linux dressed up to look like OS X. Given that I really don't like Apple's way of doing things that doesn't work for me.