GNOME To Lose Minimize, Maximize Buttons

An anonymous reader writes "When GNOME 3 arrives in a month, users might be surprised to see old UI staples 'minimize' and 'maximize' buttons gone and replaced by... nothing, in the case of minimizing, and either drag-up or double-click-titlebar for maximizing. Says Allan Day, GNOME Marketing Contractor: 'Without minimize, the GNOME 3 desktop is a more focused UI, and it is a UI that has a consistent high level of quality. Yes, moving to a minimiseless world might take a little getting used to for some, but the change makes sense and has clear benefits.' Some users already welcome the change, while others are in an uproar, swearing to wait for GNOME 3.2, switch to KDE or even Windows. What do you think? A better, simpler interface for new times, or a case of making something simpler than it should be?" I like minimize and maximize buttons, but I'll admit to liking the look of GNOME 3 .

Comments

Already Running that Version on Ubuntu

[Laebshade]

Running Ubuntu 10.10 with a gnome-shell build from the git repository, and I have to say, I love the change. The minimize and maximize functions themselves are not gone; as the summary says, you can still double click the title bar to maximize. If you want to minimize, you can right-click the titlebar, then click minimize, or using ALT+F9.

I think this is a great design change. In Gnome 2.0 and less, like windows, you would minimize windows to make room/less clutter for windows you're actually using at that top. Now, instead of minimizing, a better method is to move it down a screen (right-click, move to workspace down), or zoom out to activity view, drag the screen from one screen to another. I find when I have a lot going on -- multiple browser windows, terminals, ftp client -- I use this a lot. It comes in handy being able to separate each website you're working on, each server, into it's own workspace, free from intrusions and other unrelated stuff.

Good job Gnome devs!

IceWM FTW

[dabadab]

It seems like both the KDE and the GNOME folks have decided that they need to reinvent this whole desktop thing. KDE decided that icons are unnecessary, now GNOME deems maximize/minimize buttons unneeded.
Guess I'm lucky to use IceWM which still works the way it worked ten years ago - and I find that a good thing.

Please save your sarcasm

[tepples]

I acknowledge that some applications benefit from more horizontal real estate in a single window. I was merely pointing out that word processors and web browsers usually aren't among them.

Re:The Jump into Irrelevancy

[Sponge Bath]

"Gnome still will not have fixed 5 or 10 year old basic usability bugs..."

The timezone chooser is horrible as well. Please, just let me choose a timezone without sifting through a lengthy but not comprehensive list of cities that does not include mine. Guessing which city is in my timezone is *not* easier than just choosing my timezone.

Re:Make it configurable

[Xtifr]

When are we going to get an interface that is totally configurable to user preferences?

You mean like FVWM or IceWM or WindowMaker or E or any of the other WMs that experts love and newbies hate? Gosh, I don't know--when will we get something like that? :)

I actually find FVWM's eight separate configurations for a window border (the four sides and the four corners) to be a little bit overkill. I can't really imagine wanting the left edge to act differently from the right. Fortunately, my editor does copy-and-paste, so it's not a big issue. :)

Re:Gnome always had this problem of bad decisions.

[donscarletti]

You know, when they announced GConf, I thought like you, because I had bad experiences with the registry and back then I was an arrogant 20 year old programmer who didn't like any framework for anything, especially not tasks like configuration. However, I have warmed to it as Gnome 2.0 slowly became an OK system. Configuration should not be something that needs to be re-designed and re-implemented in every application. Things like policies, handling multiple instances of the one program, external configuration tools, etc. should work on a layer below the app. When I am writing an application, I want to be able to say, "OK, I have these options, make sure they are stored somewhere and tell me when the user wants to change them" and it works really well. It's no harder to use than libconfig or libxml2 but it has the addition that it notifies the application when a variable changes. It is a shitload easier than writing a custom parser by hand or with bison.