Ubuntu and window controls [LWN.net]

Ubuntu and window controls

Posted Mar 25, 2010 16:59 UTC (Thu) by SEMW (guest, #52697)
In reply to: Ubuntu and window controls by bronson
Parent article: Ubuntu and window controls

> 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.

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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).)