Rebel Zero

There’s been a lot of debate between users over the relocation of the title bar buttons with the new theme for Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx LTS due out in April.

During the alpha stages of Lucid’s development, a major update to Ubuntu’s theme was introduced which went far and away from the familiar brown. With that, the designers decided to also incorporate a new title bar button layout that flopped the minimize, maximize, and close buttons from the right corner to the left corner. Understandably, chaos ensued as many users offered lots of reasons why this was a horrible design change. But the term “many” should not be confused with “most” as there are plenty more users who aren’t that affected by it, myself included.

There’s been a lot of focus on window design, more so since the introduction of Google’s Chrome web browser, which omits a title bar and a menu bar altogether, yet still maintains the min, max, and close buttons, and functions quite nicely. Ubuntu hasn’t been the only one to rethink the window managers as Microsoft and Apple have done so as well in recent years.

But as much as the debate rolls on, users should not fear it so much. As many things are in the Linux universe, the change need not be a permanent one. If you’re unhappy with it, change it as Gnome provides the means to your end with gconf-editor.

Use ALT-F2 to bring up the Run Application window, enter gconf-editor and click Run. Browse to apps > metacity > general and find the button_layout field.

You can use any combination of six values: : (colon), menu, minimize, maximize, spacer, and close. Button names need to be separated with commas. The colon denotes the separation between the left and right corners. Following are some examples.

The default Lucid layout.
maximize,minimize,close:

The previous layout that we’ve been familiar with looks broken as the minimize button is designed to be sandwiched between the maximize and close buttons.
menu:minimize,maximize,close

Here’s the previous look with Lucid’s button order.
menu:maximize,minimize,close

A spacer can be added. Although it too slightly breaks the design, it may still be helpful to keep the close button separated slightly from the others. The menu button has been removed in the following example.
:maximize,minimize,spacer,close

One alternate layout is to keep the minimize and maximize buttons to the left and pushing the close button to the right.
maximize,minimize:close

With gconf-editor, you can find whatever combination you’re most comfortable with. You can also use the command line tool gconftool-2 to set the value of the layout quickly. To get the pre-Lucid layout:

gconftool-2 --set /apps/metacity/general/button_layout --type=string :minimize,maximize,close

Just because Ubuntu made a small change to the layout doesn’t mean it has to be accepted.

UPDATE: Mark Shuttleworth, Canonical’s founder, takes a brief moment to voice some opinions over the matter.