Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
There were always options to be able to move them to the other side. I'm sure the same will still hold true.
If more people want the controls on the right, then the controls should be on the right - at least by default.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
In other news:
I brushed my teeth this morning.
Fully licensed blockchain psychiatrist
...but the survey had the tick boxes on the left so I couldn't figure out how to submit my vote correctly.
Fully licensed blockchain psychiatrist
Old XKCD https://xkcd.com/1172/
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
It is configurable.
It still needs a default.
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.
My first program:
Hell Segmentation fault
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.
I say the question is Wrong.
Do you want the buttons where Microsoft Windows has them
Do you want the buttons where Apple OSX has them
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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
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...
Obviously they should compromise and put them in the middle.
-Dave
Even more: they have the code for doing both; why not let the user decide?
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
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.
Actually, no. With Gnome 3 and apps using client-side decorations and the HeaderBar where the window controls are mashed together with toolbar buttons, it's no longer possible to change window close, maximize, etc to the left side without serious hacking of GTK and possibly the apps themselves. Gtk dictates where the window buttons are going to be and what they look like (according to the GTK theme in use). So no more window manager themes in the long run.
You used to be able to disable client-side decorations which would let the window manager draw its controls still (in whatever order you configured it to), which looks a bit funny because apps will have a sort of double titlebar. However recent versions of GTK have no means for disabling CSD.
Trying to engage GTK devs over concerns about CSD won't get anyone anywhere as the devs are tired of hearing the complaints and consider the arguments tired and ignorant.
In my mind, this (client-side decorations) is a huge step backwards for usability, to say nothing of the power and flexibility that has made the Linux desktop so interesting and powerful. But hey, progress.
Bah, I just configure my screen to flip the image vertically et voilÃ!
Now the controls are to the right place.
Mastering the English language is fucking easy: all you have to do is to put an f* word in every fucking sentence.
Or better yet make them change position every time the cursor hovers over them.
sudo rm -r -f --no-preserve-root /
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
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
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
It's ironic that they should justify doing this with a poll, since when they moved them in the first place Shuttleworth specifically said that he didn't care what the users thought:
"No. This is not a democracy. Good feedback, good data, are welcome. But we are not voting on design decisions."
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubu...
Enigma
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!
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