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Ubuntu Will Revert Window Controls To the Right-Hand Side in Next Release (neowin.net)
Following a survey carried out last month, Ubuntu will begin shipping with the minimise, maximise, and close buttons on the right-hand side of windows. From a report: In the survey 46.2% of people said they prefer their window controls on the left-hand side and 53.8% said they prefer them on the right. The decision comes after seven years of window controls being on the left, at the time it had plenty of detractors but Ubuntu founder, Mark Shuttleworth, maintained that the controls needed shifting to the left because they'd be in the way of the then newly introduced window indicators.
Right up there with yesterday's breaking news about Windows console colors.
Beware of the Leopard.
51% of our users want shit on the left
49% want shit on the right
therefore left is best because a bunch of randos who filled out a survey monkey are best equipped to design our UI for us
That's not exactly a "landslide" victory. Why not just make it user-configurable?
And you might just have a better system.
If you have chanced upon a better story, and you would like us to run it here, please submit it or tip us here or on Twitter? We largely rely on the submissions readers make. At present, I see a story about EPA, and another story about Zuckerberg hiring Clinton's pollster in the firehose. How do you expect us to run the stories you would like to see on the front page when you don't alert us about it?
I mean really, the right thing would have been to have left things alone.
Being a programmer my question is, why isn't there a configuration parameter so the user can choose? Just my 2 cents ;)
In other news:
I brushed my teeth this morning.
Fully licensed blockchain psychiatrist
If I wanted a Mac I'd just go fucking buy one...
Doing what is popular instead of what is right shows they have no backbone, and they just don't give a damn care about us. Why not do what is right and stick with what Apple has proven is the best? Instead, they're weak and don't stand-up for what is right because they don't care or respect us.
If the controls have been on the left for 7 years, then why on Earth would you change the default to the right for mostly no good reason?
Really, nonsense like this is why Linux desktop adoption has been...slow.
But apparently these newfangled "user interfaces" cannot do that anymore?
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
But apparently these newfangled "user interfaces" cannot do that anymore?
You can still do it in metacity afaik. But Unity was purposely made less configurable to make support easier. It was a dumb idea and now it's going away.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Interestingly those numbers add up to 100% what about the percentage of people that didn't care.
Why does it have to be all or nothing? I prefer close on the left and max/min on the right.
We used to have arguments like this all the time at a place I worked. We built scientific software, with the UI written in C++ using Qt. The support, and the hardcore numerical solver, department heads used to have heated debates about button placement. Both had good points, and both's suggestions depended on their perspectives, and the perspective of the user base each represented (with support being more along the engineering, and the solver being more along scientific applications.)
The solution I proposed was to make the widgets dockable, and for a user's preferences to be remembered. We implemented this, and it make the argument far less heated. Instead of "where should an element BE?" it became "where should an element start?" I proposed a set of different defaults, based on science / engineering preferences, but I don't think we started down this path. We did get a cool "export preferences" feature working, so someone wouldn't have to re-dock all their widgets every time they got on a new machine.
This is the same discussion. The same solution applies.
I would prefer Ubuntu / Linux focus more resources on making my software RAID controller suck less, and fewer resources on these kind of trivial points. From a software development perspective, it's way easier to switch the position of a menu than to make my cheap 1990s server BIOS chip work...
We have 33 inch monitors with 3840 x 2400 pixels. Put the fucking buttons on BOTH sides! Or even better, get this: LET THE USER HAVE A SIMPLE CONTROL TO CHOOSE!!!!!!
Remember when the computer was about the user and giving him/her the control and choice?
Hire nerds that matter? Crowd sourcing has its limits.
Typical: a guy who has succeeded on something beyond reasonable expectation believes that he is an expert on just about everything. Reality, as usual, straightening things up.
Close on one and other buttons on the other side so one don't close accidently.
See amigaos and others doing it right.
In windows, I've always taken advantage of the 'feature' from Windows 16-bit days, where if you double-click on a program icon (on the left), it closes the window, so whenever I want to close a window, I just find the closest upper corner, and double/single click it.
You could do the same kind of thing simpler, just by having an X-mark box on the right, program icon at the left, and whenever you bring your mouse near the program icon, have it shift over and reveal a minimize/maximize/close button - and the same on the right, just slide out a minimize/maximize option. Of course, add the option to disable animations, and you're good to go - no visual clutter, but can use it wherever the window is.
Just an idea.
Ryan Fenton
That explains it...
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
When they forced them to the left, I tweaked them to the right.
Whatever happened to the ability to be able to choose the appearance of your desktop?
I may move them to the left now, just because, you can't tell me what to do. /s
Bah! You ain't from the States, are ya missy? More Trump news than ya can shake a stick at lassie. And it is what makes the coffee drinkable each morn.
In other news:
I brushed my teeth this morning.
Write a blog post. Submit it. I'll up-vote it. We'll test if slashdot really crowdsources news based on votes...
I prefer a basic Debian instal for cleanness, stability and security, though it was nice to see the window controls in a sensible position when I used Ubuntu for those occasional multimedia installs. Ah well, nothing lasts for ever.
YESSSSS!!
EPIC WIN!!!
Wow. This ranks right up there with the furious debate over which side of the toast should be buttered. Conservatives, of course, insist that it be the side they've always buttered, while liberals, deliberately non-conformist, insist it be the other. Will there ever be peace at the breakfast table?
...omphaloskepsis often...
Everybody cares when screen elements move.
"His name was James Damore."
Even more: they have the code for doing both; why not let the user decide?
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
Some of us don't want any buttons on our windows, and would prefer to have minimal to no decorations.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I can't speak specifically to Ubuntu's UI, but in general, the close/exit action belongs on the left side. The majority of us read and write from left-to-right, and so an action on the left is to move backwards while an action on the right is to go further. Web browsers reinforce this notion with the idea of back and forward buttons (though their placement may not be ideal).
It's an easy, logical standard and allows the users to quickly grasp the likely effect of their action in a pop-up dialog, for example. The affirmative choice goes on the right edge and the close / cancellation / negative response goes on the left edge. This also automatically means there is a good space between the two very opposite operations, vastly reducing the chance of a mis-click. In similar fashion, I always put the save/update action on the right and the delete action on the left.
Why is this not a common standard by now?
-IOVAR Web Dev Platform
If you have chanced upon a better story, and you would like us to run it here, please submit it or tip us here or on Twitter? We largely rely on the submissions readers make.
The Firehose is a farce. Submissions there are supposed to be voted up or down by us, the readers. In reality, the "editors" at Slashdot pick and choose what to push to the front page, often injecting their own "submissions" (and commissions, I'm sure). I imagine the amount of voting the Firehose gets from actual Slashdot readers is infinitesimal at this point, but that's due to years of abuse. We don't use it because we know it doesn't behave as intended.
When political, SJW, non-news bullshit is injected into the front page every fucking day, and when summaries make no fucking sense, and when the headlines can't even be parsed in English, why the hell would any of the few remaining Slashdot users trust the editors or the Firehose?
Asking us to use the Firehose to effect change is like asking people to send in comments to the FCC.
Why bother? This site has turned to shit over the past couple of years, and now it's infested with alt-right Trump idiots in literally every story.
This sort of blatant discrimination against lefties MUST STOP!
Time and time again Rightists stomp all over us lefties rights! er... uh... I yield back the rest of my time.
I switched to Mint long ago. Not only does it have the window controls in the right place, but it has a much more sensible selection of default applications, and I can get it with MATE, a desktop manager that's not trying to be an avant-garde tablet interface.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I'm getting real tired of having to read through that crap to get to my tech news. The next century is going to be about technologists making central bankers kneel and suck their dicks.
Seriously, WTF do you need to download and install a fucking THIRD PARTY PROGRAM to do something as ludicrously simple and common as changing window colors, fonts, size, etc...
Windows control panel let you do this is Windows 1.0!!!!
It's absolute madness that you can't change the window color by default. How come Windows figured out how to add a control panel almost 30 years ago, but Gnome still can't include a built-in control panel that lets you change window color. It's an absolute embarrassment that you need a THIRD PARTY program to do something this basic and common.
Or let the individual user decide like in the good old days.
THIS!!
Why not make it a user selectable option.
http://ahtribune.com/world/nor...
American Arms Deal at Work.
Just randomly place the controls, and note the locations where the user correctly clicks on them rather than missing them. The controls will automagically navigate to the optimal location for each user. Everybody's happy. Until they have to use someone else's machine.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
xfce means my window controls never moved - these other window managers have brain damage
This.
Is why I'm rarely here anymore.
I had thought that Ubuntu was planning to just adopt the GNOME Shell, but that's not their plan. Reading TFS I found out: their plan is to use extensions to change the GNOME Shell experience so that the desktop works more similarly to Unity.
Famously, the GNOME Shell got rid of minimize and maximize buttons completely, opting to keep only the close button.[1] To maximize you snap a window to the top of the screen. There is no minimize, but you can make any number of virtual workspaces and the equivalent of minimize is to send a window to a workspace that is not currently displayed. It's not necessarily a bad way to go, but it's really different from any other desktop environment ever.
The new Ubuntu is going to have a dock, and minimize will make the window disappear the way it does now in Unity, and you will use the dock to re-open the window just as now in Unity.
What about menus... will they be per-window or Mac OS X style? One screenshot (see it here) shows them at the top of the window. Just like Unity.
So the Ubuntu team is going to avoid the needless duplication of effort of making a complete desktop environment, but they will be customizing their GNOME Shell to work pretty much like Ubuntu works today.
I guess I should have expected it but this was surprising news for me. Personally I am still using MATE on my own computers, but I'd rather use a Unity clone than native GNOME Shell.
[1] Note that back in the GNOME 2.x days at Sun Microsystems, Sun paid for usability studies. For GNOME 3.x, a developer made the giant change of removing the minimize button by... thinking about it and talking to two other people on the GNOME 3.x development team. Who needs usability studies? Not the GNOME devs, apparently.
Actual quote: "In the end, I think with GNOME 3 we need to emphasize design coherency and slickness - what is different and better, and that actually is more important than being 100% sure we perfectly meet everybody's workflow." Personally I think the emphasis on "coherency and slickness" vs. "workflow" was a mistake, which is why I'm still using MATE. I just want to get my work done with minimal distractions.
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
I selected XFCE. Buttons on the upper right. No problem.
The buttons were moved from the right side of the window to the left side because Ubuntu was planning an amazing new feature called "windicators" ("window indicators") which were going to go on the right side of the window bar. These would show, for example, a progress bar for a background task in an app, online/offline indicator for server connection status, etc. My favorite idea: they were supposed to also provide convenient per-app volume control or mute. (PulseAudio does allow per-app volume controls but there isn't any window chrome for it; you have to go to the audio control panel, find the list of running audio apps, and control from there.)
http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/333
Windicators... never happened.
https://askubuntu.com/questions/58466/what-is-the-current-status-of-windicators
This announcement, that the window buttons are going back to the right side, indicates to me that Ubuntu has officially given up on ever implementing "windicators".
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Not rarely enough :-)
Like I tell everybody else, if you don't like it here, go away!
I used to submit 4 or 5 a week which definitely fit the criteria of news for nerds, stuff that matters. CmdrTaco was a dick. He never once published any of them so I'm jaded. This same shit happened with the nazi-editors on Wikipedia. They wouldn't even let you fix a damned typo. I won't ever help out Wiki again. Same here.
I don't think anyone considers Gnome 3 to be relevant any more. It's been infiltrated and corrupted. GTK is pretty much stagnant with Qt superior in every way. Serious technical work in Gnome 3 isn't really happening. Honestly Ubuntu isn't far behind.
Whoa, you mean the same BeauHD that's behind a crappy YouTube channel where he reviews phones and brags about his desktop setup is maybe woefully unqualified to be an editor on what used to be one of the most respected tech blogs on the Internet? I'm shocked!
How did this survey find 10,000 people who prefer window controls on the left?
Or did they just find 10K users who are sick of Ubuntu radically changing their gui every other release?
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
For the Firehose to actually work it would be nice if there were any kind of transparency at all. Users can vote up stories as much as they want (assuming they even know the firehose exists, and I'm not sure that many do), but the editors are free to ignore it and just pick whatever they want to post to the front page.
It doesn't help that most of the editors are apparently running the site in absentia, aside from apparently loading up the queue at the beginning of the day and just letting it run.
It's been clear since the latest takeover that the owners don't know what they're doing.
Part of the reason is dragging in stories about Trump, Russia, Climate Change and so on. When this site wasn't political, we could check out our political opinions at the door, and come in here and discuss things like Windows vs Linux vs Unix, Intel vs ARM, Apple vs Google and so on. Or sometimes delve into interesting although fringe stories about things like Haiju, Amiga, Minix, WebOS, Emacs, systemd or even HURD. But when political stories are given homes here on /. for clickbait, it's hard to expect either alt.rightists or ctrl.leftists to stay away
And the advise on Firehose - I've submitted things in the past, and it often got ignored in favor of the latest kooky theory on Climate Change. So don't tell us to use something that will get ignored in favor of the latest adventures in the White House or Kremlin.
Precisely! While some older OSs like NEXTSTEP automatically had it at the right, later OSs made it more flexible. On most of the DEs that I've seen - KDE, LXDE, Lumina, I've seen them give users the option of where they want it. Why not just let a user select it during installation, or the first time one logs into an account, fix it then & there, and use that until the next time it needs to change? And change it by simply dragging & dropping, rather than editing .login or something like that
"lets put all the options in one place"
systemd-windowbuttons
Let the users decide which sides they want on their own!
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Why not put them slightly to the right of the center?
It is user-configurable.
The survey was to pick the default.
That was my first thought. Also, on many window-managers those decorations are determined by the active theme and can be on either side of the window, split among both, and/or even with custom icons.
I haven't used Ubuntu's gnome flavor in awhile, so assume it's just referring to the default settings for that (it says shipping-with, so it's entirely possible it's something that can be changed and this is just the default).
crossposts to soylentnews with the exact same article summary etc either BEFORE or AFTER doing the same to slashdot. I've been wondering what kind of ad revenue shill scam they have going on there.
> It's been clear since BEFORE the latest takeover that the owners don't know what they're doing.
How about a survey on if users want systemd's million lines of untrusted code running pid1? Oh no lets make it about window manager defaults.
To /dev/null.
I keep clicking cancel on window boxes when I use Ubuntu due to being familiar with Windows.
This is a big turn off for alot of users hwo keep closing Windows dialog boxes
http://saveie6.com/
I'll just switch away from Ubuntu. How about that?
Even more: they have the code for doing both; why not let the user decide?
I'm against this. I think the default experience for what is targeted at a user friendly distro should not only have a limited configuration options but should in it's basic form be presented to the user the same way without the option to change and confuse.
Sure by all means change the entire window manager, but if something looks even a bit like Ubuntu then it should act like Ubuntu.
The same would not apply to something designed specifically for power users.
I imagine the amount of voting the Firehose gets from actual Slashdot readers is infinitesimal at this point
And I'm sure you are using the firehose actively and trying to improve the situation rather than just bitching about no one participating on the side lines and then complaining when the default action is that a few people decide on what appears because the site isn't taking an interest in its own future.
You should read the firehose sometime and see what true garbage we get as submissions on Slashdot and then be happy we're in as good a position as we are.
It's a pity that some right-wingers always want to make politics out of climate change. It really isn't - it's natural science, which is definitively news for nerds. Nerds are a wider group than just IT admins.
It would be a pity of we cannot discuss that - on a scientific basis - just because it pisses off people who put politics above science.
The AC is playing tough! The AC wants more politics! Politics everywhere! But just *his* politics - people who disagree or just don't want to avoid the US right wing political bias ticks him off so much that he can't discuss straight!
I stopped caring about the firehose a few years ago when it was choked with spam submissions, mostly from user IDs in the 39xxxxx and 4xxxxxx range. This was made worse by the complete lack of a karma system for rejected submissions. (Even with thousands of throwaway accounts, many of them would submit spam dozens of times.) Now I don't even remember the firehose URL to see if it's still as bad at it used to be.
While I admit that it is good for people who aren't established /. users to be able to submit stories (and you already don't need to be logged in to submit), there needs to be an automated way to reject submissions that are clearly off-topic (certain keywords were obviously bannable) or come from troublesome net blocks. (preferably with a "limbo" mode where the spammy submitter still sees them from his /24 IP block).
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Most of the OSs I had used had the max/min buttons on the right: early Unix with graphics (e.g. HP-UX), Windows, most Linux other than Ubuntu, many things based on Ubuntu (e.g. Kubuntu)....
All because Shuttlecock, and his minions wanted it on the left is a poor reason to have move them to the left. Now, all of a sudden, because of a single poll that is split almost 50/50 (what is the margin of error?) they suddenly want to move it to the right? What gives? The survey would suggest putting it in the middle or having it easily moved from left to right or vice versa.
Doesn't have to be IT - anything regarding computers or AI would be fine. But once you start going into things like meteorology or biology or other things, that ends up being an issue. Also, AGW/climate change would have been fine if discussed on its own: however, it invariably becomes interwoven w/ Left wing policy solutions about shutting down energy sources w/o any consideration on the ramifications on the economy at large, or whether it's globally uniform
How do you expect us to run the stories you would like to see on the front page when you don't alert us about it?
Ummm... mind reading? If you had hired a mind reader on your staff, you could post all of the stories that people want but never asked for.
Is living in reality required or can we all just stay in fantasy world? (CAPTCHA referee, lol)
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
I prefer my buttons on the bottom, you insensitive clod.
Sure - how to act on the information given by climate science is definitively a political issue. And my beef is not with people who explicitly come out and say that "we should do nothing, let whoever come after me deal with it, whatever it may be". That's OK, it is honest, but most people - no matter their political orientation - would find that a bit immoral. But it is honest, which I find more important - especially when we are supposed to check our baggage at the door.
What I have a problem with is when people are inventing straw man arguments to "take down" climate science, and we end up fighting over long-debunked hoaxes instead of actually discussing the science in depth. Which measurements have been done, what would be interesting to do, how would applying $SOME_FANCY_NEW_TECHNIQUE improve the precision of modeling etc. - that would be really interesting, and I would feel that I've learned something instead of being annoyed at some troll. But as it is now, we never get there...
When I upvote a submission in firehose, I get to choose form "fresh", "funny", "insightful", "interesting" and "maybe". Please tell me, what does "maybe" mean? And why is "fresh" there? And is green better then yellow? Is yellow better then blue?