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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.
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I mean really, the right thing would have been to have left things alone.
...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
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
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
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.
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.
Because you're stupid and wrong. Sorry, but that's the level you bring the debate down to when you say my way is the right way and why isn't everybody doing it like me. For example let's take your page navigation, the natural sequence of events is that I open a book, turn the pages, close the book. The "close" action is clearly after I've turned the pages and is the last action "beyond the end" so it should be on the right-most side. As for the second example, you're turning a natural sequence of a "yes or no" question to become a "no or yes" question. That is not a natural ordering in English and indeed most western languages.
Truth is, these things happen mostly by convention. It's not really important if they're left or right, it's that they're consistently left or right. And it's more important to be locally consistent, like everybody drives on the left or the right than to be universally consistent like all Fords drive on the right. Which is why when I use a Windows machine I expect every application to follow the Windows convention. If I use a Mac I expect them to follow the Mac convention. On Linux use whatever Gnome/KDE/Cinnamon etc. is configured to use. Those who refuse to follow convention because they know better should be taken out back and shot.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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
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.