Here is a comment from Mark Shuttleworth on the bug
[Master] Window Control buttons: position/order/alignment :
Thank you to everybody who has participated in this discussion.
The final decision on window controls for 10.04 LTS is as follows:
– the window controls will remain on the left, however
– the order will change to be (from left) close, minimize, maximise
The decision is based on the view that putting the close button in the corner will be most familiar to many users, even if the particular choice of corner is not.
For the avoidance of doubt, this is not a comment dependent on the date 🙂
Our intent is to encourage innovation, discussion, and design with the right of the window title bar. We have some ideas, and others are already springing up in the community. We welcome participation on the Ayatana list, where those can play out. This will be a fruitful topic for the design track at UDS in Brussels in May.
This bug is now marked wontfix. Please focus ongoing participation on the opportunities for innovation that this opens up. The decision as to the window controls location and order itself is now final, and as they say in the old newspapers, no further correspondence will be entered into.
My Opinion
I think the idea of moving the buttons (maximize, minimize, close) to the left side was not a good idea in the first place. It contradicts with the default layout of GNOME DE (and hence almost all other distributions using GNOME) and does not provide any value (as of now). Also, doing this starting from an LTS release was not a good idea at all. It is not difficult to adapt to the changes (I already have adapted to the latest mac like changes) for someone who uses Ubuntu as the only OS, but since Ubuntu is widely used in PCs, alongside Windows, it will be difficult for a user to use Windows and Ubuntu. It is easy to have another layout (just by switching to a different theme or following my older post), but still it is not a good out of the box experience.
The other thing that concerns me here is that Shuttleworth said “Ubuntu is not democracy” and trying to turn into next Steve Jobs. Ubuntu is by far, the most popular Linux distribution, but with steps like this, it could turn around very easily.
What do you think?
