Ubuntu and window controls

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By Jake Edge
March 24, 2010

User interface design changes are often contentious, but when the changes are to something fundamental that users are accustomed to, the outcry is even louder. On the flipside, though, good UI design is best done within a small group of dedicated folks, who may—should—be willing to think "outside the box". Innovations often come from setting aside historical precedents, but, if the process is done quietly, and presented suddenly, the shock value alone can be enough to anger users. Ubuntu's recent bug report flamewar shows just how that can play out.

As part of the Ubuntu rebranding effort, there were some obvious changes, like the move from brown to purple, but there were some more subtle changes as well. In the new Gtk theme as presented in that new brand, there were changes to the window controls. Instead of the traditional—for Linux anyway—buttons in the upper right of a window, they had moved to the upper left. But the "close" button stayed in the same relative position, so that it was no longer in the corner, but was to the right of the "maximize" and "minimize" buttons (which had swapped positions).

When the rebranding was announced, most observers focused on the color, logo, and other changes; few noticed, or mentioned, the window control changes—until those changes landed in the first Lucid Lynx (10.04) beta. Once users were faced with actually using the change, they ended up noticing it—and many weren't very happy about it. A bug was filed in Launchpad on March 5, and various arguments broke out in the bug entry about whether it was a bug, whether it was a good change or not, what the bug status should be, and who it should be assigned to. As is often the case when users don't feel that a bug report is being handled correctly, there were many status, importance, and assignment changes, with others resetting the values back to what they were—pretty typical bug tracker gamesmanship.

There were also lots of comments about the change—376 at the time that this was written. There are, of course, ways to revert the behavior, either via a personal package archive (PPA) or the command line:

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

One of the concerns expressed is that Lucid is a long-term support (LTS) release, so any change will be supported (and lived with) for three years. Another was the way in which the change came about, i.e. with essentially no warning or explanation. "Conscious User" described how it looked:

For the button positioning, however, there was absolutely no official stance from the design team on the reasoning behind it. In a recent Ars Technica article, Ryan Paul states that Ivanka Majic posted explanations in her blog [here]. As I previously stated in this bug report, not only her blog post mentions only the questions and no answers, but clearly states that she does not agree with the design herself.

I doubt that revealing the reasoning would satisfy all users, but at least they would have a base to build arguments on. Right now, a lot of people are *assuming* the reasons and criticizing Canonical based on those assumptions. This is wrong, but there's little else possible when an official statement does not exist.

Mark Shuttleworth did provide something of an "official statement" further down in the bug comments:

The default position of the window controls will remain the left, throughout beta1. We're interested in data which could influence the ultimate decision. There are good reasons both for the change, and against them, and ultimately the position will be decided based on what we want to achieve over time.

Moving everything to the left opens up the space on the right nicely, and I would like to experiment in 10.10 with some innovative options there.

But that explanation wasn't really satisfying to many of the commenters. It didn't really explain why the change was done, other than the somewhat vague statement that it opened up space on the right for unnamed "innovative options". As several commenters noted, leaving the buttons on the right opens up the left side, so it is not clear why moving the controls was needed to support these innovations. Conscious User, among others, asked Shuttleworth for "concrete, non-vague arguments in favor of the left side", but, so far at least, those arguments have not been forthcoming.

In noting that the change "landed without warning" and that there "aren't any good reasons for that", Shuttleworth tried to defuse the situation to some extent. But much of the underlying unhappiness is not just that there was no warning, but that the reasons behind the change are, at best, murky. Without knowing what the innovative plans for the right-hand side are, it makes it harder for people to understand and accept as Adam Williamson points out:

You've said a couple of times that the idea is to free up the right hand corner for Other Stuff You Will Put There Later, which is a valid idea. What I don't get, though, is why you think it makes sense to do the freeing-up before you've got around to inventing the Other Stuff. It gives people all the drawbacks of the re-arranging with none of the benefits of the Cool New Stuff, so it's not that surprising that they wind up belly-aching.

There are some hints, though, that the "Other Stuff" has been invented, or at least discussed, by the design team. That leads some to speculate that there might be Canonical business reasons not to disclose these new ideas. That runs counter to how some people believe that community distributions should be run. There is concern that important distribution decisions are being taken out of the hands of the community. Shuttleworth doesn't completely shy away from that characterization, while noting that there is room for more experts on the decision-making teams:

We have a kernel team, and they make kernel decisions. You don't get to make kernel decisions unless you're in that kernel team. You can file bugs and comment, and engage, but you don't get to second-guess their decisions. We have a security team. They get to make decisions about security. You don't get to see a lot of what they see unless you're on that team. We have processes to help make sure we're doing a good job of delegation, but being an open community is not the same as saying everybody has a say in everything.

This is a difference between Ubuntu and several other community distributions. It may feel less democratic, but it's more meritocratic, and most importantly it means (a) we should have the best people making any given decision, and (b) it's worth investing your time to become the best person to make certain decisions, because you should have that competence recognised and rewarded with the freedom to make hard decisions and not get second-guessed all the time.

But the secrecy and way that these decisions have been handled led some to wonder whether there is an autocratic element at play. Atel Apsfej wondered about Shuttleworth's credentials: "Who certified him an expert designer? He may be passionate about design but it doesn't automatically make him good at it." Further, Apsfej thinks that the Ubuntu community has the responsibility to push back:

[Who's] in a position to tell him his designs are bad if not the external Ubuntu community? You can't really expect Canonical employees to go toe-to-toe with him when he's made up his mind. That's the problem with organizational structures that are built on cults-of-personality... the lines between what it means to be a meritocracy and an autocracy get a little blurry.

While Apsfej was one of the harsher critics, his points seem to sum up the concerns of quite a few commenting on the thread. There is concern that Shuttleworth is not quite meeting the transparency promises that he has made. As Ubuntu matures, and fixing Bug #1 ("Microsoft has a majority market share") becomes more and more important, is there a need for Shuttleworth and Canonical to take a stronger hand on the rein? Apsfej explains the difference, though in characteristically stark terms:

Ubuntu is utterly and completely Shuttleworth's baby. If he wants to collaborate with the community that has been drawn into the project's promise of transparency..then he should make good on that promise and be transparent and communicate about plans. If he wants to be Steve Jobs 2.0 and wow potential consumers with innovative product offerings born from behind closed doors with no community input then he can be that instead. He just needs to decide be consistent about how he wants to interact with the Ubuntu community. Consumer or collaborators...his choice.

For his part, Shuttleworth does recognize that mistakes were made in how the design team made this change. The change is not fixed in stone, and may be reverted before the final release of Lucid. But he is not concerned about shipping a change like this in an LTS release: "If I'm confident that 10.10, 11.04 and future releases will have the controls on the left, it makes even more sense to do it now (because the LTS will then not look dated compared to newer releases)". He notes the precedent of shipping Firefox 3.0 beta for the 8.04 LTS release, which "caused an uproar but was the right decision given that 2.0 was nearing its end of life at the time".

There are risks to any change, and Shuttleworth is cognizant of those, but he also sees big opportunities:

Look, I understand this is risky. In my judgment, it's worth the risk. Being able to tackle risky things is one of the things that gives us the chance to catch up to the big guys, and beat them. That doesn't mean we should be cavalier, but I'm not going to shy away from an opportunity to do something much better now just because Microsoft did something a particular way 20 years ago.

In the end, though, Shuttleworth is defending how decisions are made in and for Ubuntu, including this one. Because it affects every window that people use, and is thus in their faces many times a day, the level of outrage got particularly high. But that kind of backlash can't stop the decision makers:

Ubuntu is plenty big enough that there is an area where anybody can make themselves an expert, take on responsibility, and lead. But it's also big enough that if we try to make everybody feel like they can weigh in on *every* decision, we'll grind to a halt.

This is a flashpoint, but most decisions are not as contentious as this one. I'm backing this decision because I think it's the right one in the long term. It may be right, it may be wrong, but I have a mandate to take the decision. The same is true of our kernel lead, and our community governance leads. They are fallible (I certainly am) but they are nevertheless empowered to take decisions.

It is unfortunate that, for whatever reason, more details about the future plans for the right-hand side of a window's title bar are not available. One gets the sense that much of the anger and unhappiness that was spewed into the bug report would have been lessened, perhaps greatly, by a better communication of the "Cool New Feature" that may wind up there. Presumably in time we will see what the plans are and can judge at that point whether the secrecy was worth it. For now it seems to have gotten a lot of people up in arms, possibly without a very good reason.

(Log in to post comments)

Risky?

Posted Mar 25, 2010 2:17 UTC (Thu) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link]

It's pathetic to find them describing sliding buttons around on the window margin as innovative and "risky". Here's a hint, Mark: you won't "catch up to the big guys" by sliding buttons around. If your designers think this is innovation, you need to fire them and hire new designers.

Most likely nobody thought it through, and now they're just blowing smoke about "innovation" to distract people from their procedural failings.

Risky?

Posted Mar 25, 2010 3:48 UTC (Thu) by DOT (subscriber, #58786) [Link]

I don't think that's the case. I believe Shuttleworth when he says he has a new feature in mind. The big question of course is: will this feature negate all the bad blood it has created between the Ubuntu dictators and their users? They really made it much more difficult for themselves to gain broad acceptance for this feature, since it will be known as "that feature that caused my buttons to move around".

upsets Users for a reason

Posted Mar 25, 2010 4:46 UTC (Thu) by tdwebste (guest, #18154) [Link]

Moving the window buttons from right to left is like changing the kbd
layout. Yes other kbd layouts are perhaps faster, but qwert is the one
EVERYONE knows.

People use habit to speed up repetitive task, which happen to include window
minimizing, maximizing and closing.

upsets Users for a reason

Posted Mar 25, 2010 5:50 UTC (Thu) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

The only thing that sucks is that the 'close window button' is much too close to the edit menu.

People _very_ frequently use that window for all sorts of stuff. Mostly copy-n-pasting. For some people it's one of the more frequently used menus in any application.

Closing out the window is very destructive. Especially since Linux copy-n-paste is broken for non-freedesktop-compliant applications (like firefox and most other browsers). If you copy something and close out a window you lose what your copying.

Putting a destructive item like that just spaced a pixel or 3 away from one of the most frequently utilized UI elements in a application is just not good design.

Going to copy-n-paste and missing the edit menu by mere millimeter of hand movement can mean losing hours of works. Even just minutes of work is extremely bothersome. "Oh, look, I moved my hand by the distance of a hair and now instead of pasting this hour-long message I typed up, I lost everything! Yay!"

You don't need to be a expert in anything to understand that. It's like placing a jar of white powdered rat poison next to the sugar in your cupboard.

As far as Apple goes, it works out just fine because the menu items are not in the window, but at the top of the screen. So there is no conflict like there is for Windows or for Linux.

upsets Users for a reason

Posted Mar 25, 2010 9:54 UTC (Thu) by liljencrantz (guest, #28458) [Link]

I agree with the main gist of your post, but the part about Apple having a different situations is not entirely true. A huge number of Mac applications have a tool bar stripe right below the window buttons, and tool bars, much like the edit menu, is a very frequently used UI element.

upsets Users for a reason

Posted Mar 25, 2010 16:00 UTC (Thu) by foom (subscriber, #14868) [Link]

> Putting a destructive item like that just spaced a pixel or 3 away from one of the most frequently
> utilized UI elements in a application is just not good design.

Any application that tosses your unsaved changes when you hit the close button, without so much
as prompting you is simply broken...the close button should never actually be destructive.

Of course, do you have a point regarding the interaction between closing a document when it *is*
saved to disk and the completely broken copy/paste implementation that linux prides itself on
having.

upsets Users for a reason

Posted Mar 25, 2010 16:10 UTC (Thu) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

Even when it's a seemingly non-destructive action, it's annoying. If I close a PDF I'm reading, or a web page, I have to find it again (somehow - history in the browser, knowing where it is in the filesystem), and get back to my previous position. I've also lost my train of thought, and have to settle back in, as I've been distracted by finding the document again.

upsets Users for a reason

Posted Mar 27, 2010 9:50 UTC (Sat) by k8to (subscriber, #15413) [Link]

> Any application that tosses your unsaved changes when you
> hit the close button, without so much as prompting you is
> simply broken...the close button should never actually be
> destructive.

What a pretty idea.

Unfortunately it runs into trouble when it encounters complex
multipurpose programs like a web browser. If the browser refused to
close because you had a textarea in it that you entered a character
into somewhere, you would not be happy. How about INPUT fields
entered by javascript, or pre-populated by javascript?

upsets Users for a reason

Posted Mar 27, 2010 15:08 UTC (Sat) by foom (subscriber, #14868) [Link]

My browser *does* do that, and I *am* happy. I haven't noticed it having any false positives.

It says:

Are you sure you want to close this window?

You have entered text on Comment editor [LWN.net]. If you close the window, your changes will
be lost. Do you want to close the window anyway?

[Cancel] [Close]

Risky?

Posted Mar 26, 2010 10:10 UTC (Fri) by Cato (subscriber, #7643) [Link]

The only precedent I can think of is when Apple introduced MacOS X and did a similar move of the buttons from right to left. However, that was an entirely new operating system with a completely different look and feel, which is very different to an Ubuntu upgrade.

Moving the buttons around does seem pointless, and I strongly suspect it was not properly tested for usability - that would at least have caught the tendency to click one of these buttons when trying to click the Edit menu.

Macbuntu?

Posted Mar 25, 2010 5:33 UTC (Thu) by ringerc (subscriber, #3071) [Link]

Just because Apple does it, doesn't mean it's right. Users here at work STILL get confused by the traffic-light bauble window control buttons.

See, eg: http://mac.softpedia.com/progScreenshots/Address-Close-Bu...

Which does what? Who knows! Mouse over them and pale embossed looking icons will appear, but they're still not all that good. Now, what's being done for 10.10 isn't that bad, but it still sounds ... interesting.

Apple's design there is one of the more widely reviled UI design choices, and I can't for the life of me figure out why they'd do anything like it.

Macbuntu?

Posted Mar 25, 2010 5:36 UTC (Thu) by ringerc (subscriber, #3071) [Link]

In a reply-to-self, it _is_ worth noting that the proposed buttons are a LOT clearer and better than the Mac OS X ones.

Also, Apple's button positioning on the top left is "right" psychologically for left-to-right, top-to-bottom reading cultures (ie: increasingly all of them) because the top-right corner is a visual dead zone that we're not good at noticing things in. So copying that much _is_ a good idea.

As for the close box not being edge-most... that seems pretty strange.

Ubuntu and window controls

Posted Mar 25, 2010 5:50 UTC (Thu) by branden (subscriber, #7029) [Link]

A long time ago, some windowing system (I don't even remember which one--maybe someone can help?) mandated that window controls be in the upper-left, EXCEPT for the close button, which would be all by itself at the upper right.

The rationale was that it makes it much more difficult for a minor mouse slip to accidentally kill an application.

This always made sense to me, but I have to admit after years of using cram-them-all-to-the-right interfaces, I can't think of a single time I ever made this mistake.

Canonical's decision seems to be a deviation from a widely-accepted and familiar convention without even the notional advantage of the approach I described above.

Head-scratcher.

Ubuntu and window controls

Posted Mar 25, 2010 8:30 UTC (Thu) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185) [Link]

Fvwm, Mwm and Windows 3.x had the same layout: menu box, title, minimize,
maximize. Myself, using KWin, I've put close top-left, and min/max to the
right. I've got no use for a menu box, but I do remember I often clicked
close by accident when using Windows 95.

Ubuntu and window controls

Posted Mar 25, 2010 18:24 UTC (Thu) by aleXXX (subscriber, #2742) [Link]

Exactly the same here, close alone to the left, no window-menu,
min/max/stick in the right corner.

Nice side effect is to watch other people being confused when they want
to click some windows-button on my desktop ;-)

Alex

Ubuntu and window controls

Posted Mar 25, 2010 17:23 UTC (Thu) by bferrell (subscriber, #624) [Link]

It all came from IBM CUA/CUI

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_User_Access

Ubuntu and window controls

Posted Mar 25, 2010 22:16 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

It wasn't until I realised that IBM was responsible not only for SGML but
also for SQL and CUA that it finally dawned on me just how *evil* they
used to be.

Ubuntu and window controls

Posted Mar 25, 2010 6:51 UTC (Thu) by Felix.Braun (subscriber, #3032) [Link]

I like to work with maximized windows. Therefore, with the old button setup, the close-window-button was frighteningly close to the shut-down button in the upper right hand corner of the panel. Because of that, I have long moved my window controls to the left of the window. Given that, the change introduced now in the standard theme seems quite sensible to me :-)

Seriously though, I honestly don't understand the fuss this change has caused. This is Linux. Everything is open and tunable to your personal preferences. If you don't like purple, a new background is literally just three clicks away. If you want to shuffle around your window controls, even GNOME (which is usually criticised for being too inflexible) lets you do that. Granted, doing that while keeping the standard theme requires using gconf-editor. But you can always switch themes in a way discoverable even by the freshest noob.

Making this into a huge project governance issue seems quite over the top to me.

Ubuntu and window controls

Posted Mar 26, 2010 10:13 UTC (Fri) by Cato (subscriber, #7643) [Link]

Ubuntu is meant to be Linux for ordinary people, who have no clue about how to move buttons around, and most likely aren't aware that's even possible.

Ubuntu and window controls

Posted Mar 26, 2010 14:50 UTC (Fri) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]

I feel like that's the real shame here. The answer should be: "Don't like where the buttons are or how they work? Use the easy-to-find, easy-to-use configuration tool to make them different." (And while you're at it, find out that there are a ton of useful triggers possible that you wouldn't have thought of.)

Personally, I've got a menu button which I double-click to close in the upper left, a button next to it to send the window to the back in stacking order, the title, a minimize button, and a maximize button in the upper right. The only one of these I regularly use is the menu menu, which I double-click and sometimes use the "stay on top" item from the menu. I normally minimize with shift-left-windows, and maximize with left-shift-right-shift, which don't require me to aim at fiddly little buttons.

I don't think that my customizations would make good defaults, but I think that it would be a great point in favor of Linux if the time that office workers spend personalizing their desktops extended to functional improvements in their individual work flows.

Ubuntu and window controls

Posted Apr 2, 2010 14:29 UTC (Fri) by jzbiciak (subscriber, #5246) [Link]

I actually agree with this statement by and large. I consider myself something of a UNIX and computer geek, having hacked all my own config files inside and out 17 years ago when it was something "fun" to do. These days, I've got bigger fish to fry, and having to figure out how to move the buttons around my window is not something I know how to do, or feel like I should have to figure out how to do.

I'd be rather annoyed if they didn't give me a friendly GUI for undoing their decisions, seeing as those buttons have been in that position for quite a long time. I have a lot of muscle memory built up and other computers I whose buttons won't be moving. It sounds Ubuntu won't be offering such a GUI, though. I guess I'll just have to be annoyed. (I'll also have to come back here for the magic incantation on how to fix it.) It'll be like the [Ctrl] vs. [Caps-Lock] keyboard layout issue all over again, with one keyboard with [Ctrl] at the left, and the rest with [Caps-Lock] there. ("xmodmap" to the rescue, in that case.)

BTW, your comment did remind me of an old Dilbert comic. *chuckle*

Look what they've done to my oatmeal...

Posted Mar 25, 2010 7:26 UTC (Thu) by jonas.bonn (subscriber, #47561) [Link]

On the periphery of the Linux community there is a rather large number of
"conservative bikeshedders". Each and every change that's introduced
within the field of vision of this group is met by essentially the same
response: screams of bloody murder!

Ubuntu has "innovated" by running the gauntlet of neighsayers release upon
release and emerged essentially unscathed. Ubuntu is a widely popular
distribution despite contentious features like fast-boot (Upstart), working
audio (Pulseaudio), desktop effects (Compiz), minimal configurability
(Gnome), and, now, a "fresh" look-and-feel.

This is not going to be the last change in Ubuntu so this is not the last
time we are going to be reading this particular article. What's next? I
suspect Zeitgeist integration on the top-right of the window, and we know
Gnome Shell is just around the corner. So six months from now, September
2010, LWN greets us with "Ubuntu and Zeitgeist" or "Ubuntu and Gnome Shell"
and the same cast of characters is once again lamenting the passing of the
"good old days."

The flipside is that it's likely the exact same group who would be
bemoaning the lack of innovation, the stagnancy of the distribution, if
these more visible changes were not being made... and then I'd be writing
this comment about the large number of "liberal bikeshedders" in the
community!

Look what they've done to my oatmeal...

Posted Mar 25, 2010 9:43 UTC (Thu) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link]

Why introduce such changes on a beta? If you want to get them tested, get them in time for the alpha releases. You'll then get some useful feedback.

The users who suffer here are the ones who are actually expected to pay Ubuntu for support: the users of Ubuntu LTS.

Look what they've done to my oatmeal...

Posted Mar 25, 2010 15:13 UTC (Thu) by duanedesign (guest, #64177) [Link]

I thought this was a refreshingly sane and interesting look at a subject I was tired of hearing about. Additionally the comments made by jonas seem right on.

Too often Open Source is judged successful if it produces a copy of a proprietary application. I am glad to see Open Source innovating. It makes sense to put the window controls on the left, IMHO. This is the location of a lot of programs menus as well as the aplication, places, and system menu. The forward and back buttons in Firefox and many comparable controls in other apps are also on the left. I have yet to accidentally close a window. I do not suffer from uncontrollable muscle memory. After using this set up for a week I have grown completely accustom to the change and do not miss the old location at all.

If they do move the controls back to the right I will likely run the command to move them to the left. I will also likely spend no time blogging and raising hell about how things are not exactly as I would want. I have found if your happiness is always based on only one particular outcome of a situation you will spend way too much time in life unhappy.

Look what they've done to my oatmeal...

Posted Apr 1, 2010 9:09 UTC (Thu) by yeti-dn (guest, #46560) [Link]

There is some insight in the first three paragraphs, however this

The flipside is that it's likely the exact same group who would be bemoaning the lack of innovation, the stagnancy of the distribution, if these more visible changes were not being made... and then I'd be writing this comment about the large number of "liberal bikeshedders" in the community!

is utter and total rubbish.

There are many conservatives like me who think distributions tend to play too much with fancy stuff instead of fixing problems and that they diverge too much from upstream. I have never complained about lack of innovation. Nothing is more annoying than when things that used to work stop working in the name of some bloody useless innovation. And there's nothing "bikeshed painting" on that.

Ubuntu and window controls

Posted Mar 25, 2010 9:37 UTC (Thu) by michaeljt (subscriber, #39183) [Link]

Personally, this is the sort of change that makes me enjoy upgrading Ubuntu - noticable
enough to freshen things up, but harmless enough not to affect productivity (at least for
me). It's not as if I haven't seen different window decoration styles over the years I have
used Linux-based systems. And although I don't really agree about design decisions
needing to be done behind closed doors (you can justify anything by saying "but this is
different and needs to follow different rules!"), so far Mark S.'s way of managing his
distribution seems to be getting the blessing of the silent majority of users. No one is
forced to use Ubuntu at the moment, as currently only Microsoft commands that sort of
lock-in on the desktop, so while it certainly isn't properly grassroots democratic, the "take
it or leave it" vote that its users can cast is still a genuine one.

What saddens me a bit though is my suspicion, which I just can't lay to rest, that Ubuntu
is running after OS X's makeup. From the new look of the wireless connection icon, to the
purple background, to the new button position, it seems to be copying all the superficial
design decisions. While I would love to see Linux distributions take inspiration from Mac
OS in general, especially from its attention to detail and to usability (e.g. when I select and
delete a word in a GUI text field, Mac OS will correct the spacing, Ubuntu/Gnome will not),
this seems to me more like cargo culting (anyone know a nicer term for that?) - particularly
as from a usablility design point of view, OS X is by no means the clear leader of the Mac
OS line.

Sorry if that was a bit long, just more water under the bridge...

Ubuntu and window controls

Posted Mar 25, 2010 9:38 UTC (Thu) by michaeljt (subscriber, #39183) [Link]

Oh no, just seen what a mess Epiphany-Webkit has made of the formatting there. It didn't
look like that in the preview!

Ubuntu and window controls

Posted Mar 25, 2010 14:06 UTC (Thu) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

Unfortunately it's a problem with all the webkit browsers and lwn. They seem to like to inject newlines were they are not wanted. I don't hae this problem in other forms. Have to use the br element and use 'html' format.

Ubuntu and window controls

Posted Mar 25, 2010 14:33 UTC (Thu) by michaeljt (subscriber, #39183) [Link]

Yes, I saw your pain in some of your previous postings :) Do you know if this is a webkit bug, or whether it is to do with some unfortunate interaction between webkit and lwn? I opened a ticket for it with the webkit people, but if it doesn't appear to be their fault I will close it again.

Ubuntu and window controls

Posted Mar 25, 2010 14:55 UTC (Thu) by michaeljt (subscriber, #39183) [Link]

No, it definitely affects Launchpad too.

Ubuntu and window controls

Posted Mar 25, 2010 15:53 UTC (Thu) by foom (subscriber, #14868) [Link]

Webkit is just doing physical wrap, as the form definition requests!

LWN's comment text field says:
<textarea wrap="physical" rows="15" name="c_body" cols="75">

I'm not sure why LWN even has that attribute: I'd suggest just removing it. I'm pretty sure the site
code itself already hard wraps any input you send it, so asking the browser to do so too is just
asking for trouble...

(Note that that's not actually part of any HTML spec: it's a netscape extension from way back
when...)

Ubuntu and window controls

Posted Mar 25, 2010 18:15 UTC (Thu) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

Awesome!! I've wondered what was going on. Removing it sounds prudent.

Pretty funny that Mozilla ignores it while Chrome and Konq support it.

Ubuntu and window controls

Posted Mar 25, 2010 11:16 UTC (Thu) by pcampe (guest, #28223) [Link]

Whatever the cool stuff in the right corner will be, it must be something that you use *more often* than the maximize/minimize/close buttons, or this innovation is just some syntactic sugar.

Ubuntu and window controls

Posted Mar 25, 2010 11:24 UTC (Thu) by error27 (subscriber, #8346) [Link]

I do like the idea of getting rid of tool bars all together ala Chrome.

These days I just reconfigure Gnome to be like Windows. I'll probably keep on doing that. I don't get the point of the bar on both the top and bottom of the screen or changing the buttons.

Ubuntu and window controls

Posted Mar 25, 2010 11:40 UTC (Thu) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

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)

Ubuntu and window controls

Posted Mar 25, 2010 16:59 UTC (Thu) by SEMW (subscriber, #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 (subscriber, #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).)

Ubuntu and window controls

Posted Mar 25, 2010 12:01 UTC (Thu) by mezcalero (subscriber, #45103) [Link]

I guess the summary of it all is "bike shedding". The question though is who is building and who's shedding?

Ubuntu and window controls

Posted Mar 25, 2010 12:19 UTC (Thu) by Frej (subscriber, #4165) [Link]

yeah everybody can argue because it's one of the simple changes, say unlike discussion the IO
scheduler. So it gets to bikeshedding.
But really, the button placement is not worse or better it's just different.

But 'different' really means something for usability, because a lot of theory is argues that it's
important to form good habits so that actions become unconscious. David Norman a good
articles about the real world and everyday actions, and closely related is the idea of the
formation of habits.

The problem is changing another persons habits. Think about how hard it is for you to change
bad, and to get other people to change theirs. It's not a problem over time, but you or others will
get frustrated.

If you use a system often and the buttons are always the place, it's not going to be a problem.
You will get used to it.

Ubuntu and window controls

Posted Mar 25, 2010 15:51 UTC (Thu) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

In terms of user experience things like I/O scheduler choices actually have much less of a impact then button placement.

For the purposes of the desktop what happens with applications like Metacity, Desktop search, and that sort of stuff is much more important then anything going on in the LKML. GTK and themeing is of much higher level of importance then 90% of the changes that have happenned in the Linux kernel since 2.620 or so (minus the increase in driver/hardware support). The best positive impact the kernel and other low-level things can do is improve graphics support, get drivers out to users faster, and (most importantly) avoid breaking people's systems.

If people are forced to care about low-level things like file systems on their Desktop all it largely means is that Linux has failed as a desktop OS kernel.

Now in terms of workstation or server duties things get a lot simplier and a lot murkier for Linux since you tend to be dealing with higher technical requirements and more technical sorts of people... but largely if the user has to give a crap about low-level things it's still a bit of a failure unless there is a huge positive benefit to doing so. (fixing breakage is not a huge positive benefit.. it's something that should not happen in the first place ideally.)

Of course that does not mean that it's worth getting upset and flaming people over it button placement. It still is rather petty to really get angry over. But it certainly, for most people's experiences using the OS, it's going to be much less 'bikeshedding' then, say, debating the merits of XFS vs Ext3. :)

Ubuntu and window controls

Posted Mar 25, 2010 12:12 UTC (Thu) by ewan (subscriber, #5533) [Link]

That runs counter to how some people believe that community distributions should be run.

Ubuntu is in no sense a community distribution. It's much more akin to something like Redhat Enterprise in development terms. There's an open, community led, essentially democratic upsteam (Debian and Fedora), then a commercial organisation (Canonical or Redhat) takes the output from that, pares it down to something they think they can support, and adds some twists for 'differentiation'. There may also be a community repository to add back in some of the things that got left out (Universe and EPEL).

It's not a bad model, per se, but it does no-one any good to try to call it something it's not.

Ubuntu and window controls

Posted Mar 25, 2010 14:00 UTC (Thu) by dsas (subscriber, #58356) [Link]

You don't have to be a Canonical employee in order to be able to upload to the main repository.

Ubuntu and window controls

Posted Mar 26, 2010 3:28 UTC (Fri) by skvidal (guest, #3094) [Link]

A couple of items:

1. It's Red Hat <- two words. I know the font doesn't look like that, but it is.

2. Red Hat and Fedora put their changes upstream. It's a big deal in fact. A real big deal.

Ubuntu and window controls

Posted Mar 25, 2010 12:30 UTC (Thu) by ctwise (guest, #10952) [Link]

Very few people feel qualified to comment on kernel decisions but everyone feels qualified to comment on
design. The biggest issue for design in an area dominated by engineers is that engineers have no respect
for it. It's a nebulous process. There is no specific right or wrong.

But the effects are very real and individual decisions affect the whole. The majority of people in the Linux
space are mystified by Apple's success and, when looking at an OS/X desktop, don't see - or respect -
the work that's gone into it.

Apple's success of late has come directly from giving the designers more control. They believe that good
UI design and appearance actually matters. Shuttleworth has drunk the kool-aid and is trying to push in
that direction. Not to mimic the OS/X design but to mimic the emphasis on design.

Is the new design good? I have no idea. But what I do know is that a coherent vision and consistency are
critical to good design. You can't pick apart specific elements without damaging the whole. Like Apple,
they believe they have built a better mousetrap and they want you to alter yourself to use it. They believe
the design they've created has its benefits, but you'll never see them unless you give it a chance.

Rejecting the design out-of-hand is pointless. Nothing can ever improve if you refuse to accept change.
If you give it a fair shake and still hate it, fine. At least you tried it and can speak authoritatively about its
defects and failings.

Ubuntu and window controls

Posted Mar 25, 2010 14:35 UTC (Thu) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]

> ... who may -should- be willing to think "outside the box". Innovations often come from setting aside historical precedents
> [...]
> Instead of the traditional buttons in the upper right of a window, they had moved to the upper left.

ha-ha

Upstream

Posted Mar 25, 2010 16:40 UTC (Thu) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link]

A point nobody has mentioned is whether Ubuntu will be submitting this change upstream to the GNOME user interface team, and whether they are making any effort to keep a consistent user experience between different flavours of Linux (and other GNOME-using systems).

Ubuntu and window controls

Posted Mar 25, 2010 19:16 UTC (Thu) by jengelh (subscriber, #33263) [Link]

>This is a difference between Ubuntu and several other community distributions. It may feel less democratic, but it's more meritocratic,

Look at that, Ubuntu calling itself meritocratic. That's sarcasm, right? (Referring to the issue of copying of(f) Debian.)

Ubuntu and window controls

Posted Mar 30, 2010 17:09 UTC (Tue) by Tet (subscriber, #5433) [Link]

Instead of the traditionalfor Linux anywaybuttons in the upper right of a window

Sigh. I've come to expect better from LWN, but anyway this is completely wrong. Traditionally, the close button was in the top left, and maximize/iconify buttons were on the top right, both under Linux and in common with virtually ever other windowing system (mostly as a consequence of the IBM CUA guidelines). Then Microsoft released Windows 95 and moved all three buttons to the top right. No, I don't understand it either. From a usability perspective, it's a nightmare, with the close button being way too close to the others, for no obvious gain. But everyone copied them, and soon large numbers of X11 window managers were doing the same thing. Then after a while, OS X came along and moved everything to the left hand side, making even more usability mistakes by removing the visual differences between the buttons and relying solely on colour. But now, as with Win95 before it, we're starting to see people copying them. I don't understand that, either. But I tend to just let them get on with it. Morons will be morons, and there's nothing much I can do about it. Me? I've still got the CUA button layout. It works well, and I see no need to change it.

Ubuntu and window controls

Posted Apr 1, 2010 19:36 UTC (Thu) by callegar (guest, #16148) [Link]

IMHO it is a bad idea to move the maximise, minimize, close buttons to the left.

1) There is no provable usability advantage;
2) It eliminates the application icon making windows less recognizable, since before one could implicitly rely on associative visual memory, while now the explicit effort of reading the title bar is required;
3) It makes the association between windows and windows in the taskbar weaker, since before one could rely on associative memory (the application icon was preserved in presence and position between the window bar and the entry in the task bar) and now it is not anymore the case;
4) It gratuitously breaks a convention (these buttons are on the right)
5) It increases the chance of hitting one of these buttons by mistake looking for the file menu (and as already said by others to hit the window close button by mistake is not nice)...

But it is really no big deal until things can be easily configured back as they were.

Only, Ubuntu should either have their customisations accepted upstream or ship them confined in ad-hoc packages. Namely, have a gnome-ubuntu-customisation deb that when installed gives the ubuntu behavior and when not installed the upstream one. And yes, of course with this it would be perfectly ok to have it installed by default.

Ubuntu and window controls

Posted Apr 1, 2010 22:26 UTC (Thu) by aigarius (subscriber, #7329) [Link]

Apparently the buttons will only be on the left for the new themes - the old
themes currently are the same as in 9.10: with buttons on the right.