I wasn’t going to write this post. I was going to get used to the idea of my window buttons being on the left, instead of the right where I’m used to them. I was really going to try and use the Ubuntu “standard”. Well, after a little more than a month, I give up. If you’re the same and you’d like your window buttons back “where they belong”, this post will outline how to move window buttons back to the right.
For those in a hurry, I’ve outlined the quickest way known to man to move the window buttons back to the right. Open a terminal (Applications > Accessories > Terminal), and paste in the following command:
gconftool -s /apps/metacity/general/button_layout -t string menu:minimize,maximize,close
Magically your window buttons will be back to the “right” place.
For those that are afraid of the terminal and their copy-paste functionality, you can follow these steps:
- Press ALT-F2 to open the application launcher.
- Enter ‘gconf-editor’
- Navigate to Apps > Metacity > General > Button Layout
- Change the string value to ‘menu:minimize,maximize,close’
- Exit gconf-editor
Those steps aren’t too bad either. I prefer the first, of course, but perhaps it has a little too much “magic” to it.
In conclusion I think the move is still controversial. I would have expected some of these controversial changes in a development release, but not an LTS (Long Term Support) release. In any case, I’m not here to make decisions.