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.

Comments

Re:Here is my question?

[fph il quozientatore]

There used to be one, but it was removed. The main issue is that in Unity there is no space for buttons on the right in a maximized window, because that space is taken by the taskbar and clock. If you try to move the buttons on the right, you end up with an inconsistent or uncomfortable mess.

Ubuntu will implement Unity in GNOME

[steveha]

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.