Ubuntu and window controls [LWN.net]

Ubuntu and window controls

Posted Mar 25, 2010 11:40 UTC (Thu) by bronson (subscriber, #4806)
Parent article: Ubuntu and window controls

I run

   gconftool-2 --set /apps/metacity/general/button_layout \
                   --type string "close:minimize,maximize"

on every account where I run Gnome. Close on the left, minimize and maximize on the right. Two reasons:

Get rid of the useless menu button. Just right click on the title bar if you want to turn on Always On Top.
Move the dangerous close button as far away from the minimize and maximize buttons as possible.

I think I agree with other commenters here that the close button belongs on the right: get it far away from the File and Edit menus. I'll have to try that next time.

If Ubuntu would just provide a place on the Windows control panel to control this, everyone could have their own preferred button layout. We all have different history and expectations allowing people to easily set it seems like the only way to make everyone happy (like focus-follows-mouse).

Really, since the code is already written anyway, where's the downside to exposing just this configuration option in the GUI? (no slippery slope arguments please)

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Ubuntu and window controls

Posted Mar 25, 2010 16:59 UTC (Thu) by SEMW (guest, #52697) [Link]

> If Ubuntu would just provide a place on the Windows control panel to control this, everyone could
> have their own preferred button layout.

For what it's worth, Ubuntu Tweak -- a popular tool that exposes some gconf options in a GUI and that, I would guess, quite a high proportion of the kind Ubuntu user who argues over this sort of thing on Launchpad already runs -- has already released a version that lets you change window button order.

This is a situation that Canonical's probably delighted with -- they don't have to expose a new configuration option by default (Canonical seems to share Gnome's point of view regarding configuration options), but, for people who want to have the control in a pretty GUI, the tool isn't far away. Similar to Microsoft's stance on TweakUI.

Ubuntu and window controls

Posted Mar 25, 2010 18:11 UTC (Thu) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

If Ubuntu would install a few bits of gtweakui with the default install, people would probably whine a lot less about button positions.

In Karmic, I only see gtweakui-galeon (I remember those days), gtweakui-menus, gtweakui-nautilus, and gtweakui-session. Nothing to change the window buttons...?

Ubuntu and window controls

Posted Mar 26, 2010 0:13 UTC (Fri) by SEMW (guest, #52697) [Link]

Ubuntu-tweak is a separate, and much more ambitious, project to gtweakui (which, AFAICT, is abandoned -- hasn't been updated since 2004. And for what it's worth, some parts of it actually do seem to have been incorporated into Gnome proper at some point -- e.g. the "Interface" tab in Gnome's Appearance tab certainly seems to be straight out of gtweakui-menus).

Ubuntu-Tweak isn't in the repositories; their ppa is ppa:tualatrix/ppa .

(I am slightly dubious about some parts of it -- e.g. it has its own application centre, which has echos of Automatix etc. in that it tries its hardest to hide the distinction between programs in and not in the Ubuntu repositories from the user. Given its target market -- tweakers, so power users of a sort -- I'm not sure why they think this is necessary, or desirable. (This is also the part which makes it Ubuntu specific -- it apparently works perfectly well on e.g. Fedora, as long as you stick to the parts which *are* just a front-end to gconf and avoid the package management bits).)