Ubuntu developers make their first MAJOR mistake with 10.04

You've all been reading over the months of what a fan I've become of Ubuntu... well, I'm trying out the new release, 10.04 Beta 2, and I must say, though it loads SUPER FAST, I have to throw my two cents in now... I HATE THE DECISION BY THE CORE UBUNTU DESIGN TEAM TO MOVE THE LOCATION OF THE WINDOW BUTTONS!!!

The main reason many of us are looking to Ubuntu is as a Microsoft Windows replacement. However, the design team has decided to change the location of the main window control buttons, Minimize, Maximize and Close, OVER TO THE LEFT, like they do in the Mac world, as opposed to Windows and EVERY PREVIOUS UBUNTU RELEASE, where they normally reside on the right.

This one's a BIG deal for a whole lot of people in the Ubuntu community. I've been reading complaints all over the place, and the design team has decided to shut down debate and stick with the left hand placement of the buttons.

Bad move guys... I hope you intend to make it easy for most of us to customize it back, because I can promise you this, it's one of the first things I'm gonna have to do with each and every install I do.

Or it may cause me to not bother with the install. I'm seriously debating whether or not to bother putting this one on my laptop. I was already debating it, having just updated my laptop with the FREE copy of Windows 7 Ultimate that Microsoft provided me with a little while back. (yes, they're trying to woo some of us back into the MS fold)

While I know most people will just look at this as a cosmetic thing, it's not. It's a BIG DEAL, since a lot of us are constantly switching back and forth between the Ubuntu and the Windows worlds. I've even been thinking about putting together proposals on how we can use Ubuntu within our organization, but now, I'm having a rethink on that. YOU try and teach dozens of older nurses a totally new way of doing things with a new OS, and then telling them that the folks who make the decisions have decided to make things more complicated for you by moving the three buttons that are used CONSTANTLY. The main menus being at the top are easy to adjust to... moving those little three buttons IS NOT.

One PARTIAL fix is to run the following command, which will move them to the right side, but will leave the MAXIMIZE and MINIMIZE buttons switched... which I can live with. (to change the order of them breaks the aesthetics) To run the command, press ALT+F2, then enter the following:

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

Did that, and now I'm a "little" more at peace with the new Ubuntu...

UPDATE: If the above command breaks the button order, try adding a comma after the "close" option... like so:

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