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Comment by aw3c2 | Hacker News Reader

The GTK themes seem terrible to me. Not only did they move the top buttons to the left (good luck explaining to mom why she won't find the X where she's used to) but also it looks very inconsistent. Also the colours... It looks like one of those old themes why your friends still make fun of your Linux.

The web theme looks like a generic hosting company' website. Or like a hardware manufacturer.

I love the mission though, "Light" is a very good selling point for Linux. You might not agree about that for Ubuntu but more Ubuntu = more Linux = yay.

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Nobody seems to be able to explain the window controls, so hopefully we can be loud enough to get them to switch them back. Everyone should write/harass important people at Canonical regarding this.

I really seriously doubt they have anything approaching sufficient data for the change. It breaks every convention a user would be familiar with (though the controls are on the left like in OS X, the functionality of the buttons is reversed; in OS X, leftmost closes, here, rightmost closes), including existing Ubuntu users.

Commence pressure on Canonical promptly.

It seems like a rather superficial change to me. If you were to sit down and use it, you would probably get used to it quickly. It didn't take me long to get used to Windows 95 putting the menu bar inside the window, or its menu-title-min-max-close pattern instead of close-title-lower-raise.

Also, as for breaking conventions, OS X breaks many conventions a Linux/Windows user would be familiar with, but nobody is suggesting that Apple restyle their OS to look like Windows.

That said, I can see where working regularly on both OS X and Ubuntu's new branding could get frustrating, because the buttons are in the same place, but different.

I disagree. Apple has a quality OS that forces users to use the left-hand buttons, and Ubuntu's perfectly free to try the same thing. In my opinion, buttons should be placed on the left of the menu bar. I've seen that users tend to keep their windows to the left of the screen, and left-side controls may require less mouse movement on average to reach, whereas the right side's edge is dependent on the window size.

I also sort of like the close button on the right with the buttons on the left edge (reverse of OSX as you noted). I think that makes it slightly more difficult to accidentally close the window.

they are perfectly free to use it ....as long as they will be not sued due to 'innovative apple idea' of three buttons on the left side

IMHO, the UI aspect that makes the single biggest impact is high resolution icons.

Take a look at the 512X512 OSX icons (or Win 7 ones) and compare them with Ubuntu ones.

I think moving the top buttons is a terrible idea

I agree. I also see no point in making a different theme the default one, because you can easily change it to another. And also because most people would be updating their distros and would not notice any changes.

Agreed, overall "meh", but I hope there's a clone of the final theme except with min/max/close in the old position.

There's a simple setting you can change in gconf to fix this (at least there used to be): /apps/metacity/general/button_layout. You should set it to "menu:minimize,maximize,close" to get the old functionality back.

Is the X really an issue? That's where it is on Mac OS X.

On Windows and OS X, the close button is at the far top right or far top left respectively. This theme introduces a new variant: third from top left.

The top left is where the close button has been the Mac since the mid-80s. But the question is not “is it really an issue?” but rather “why is it being moved?” Change for change’s sake is stupid.

Seems like the consensus is: "(10:30:18 PM) vish: the metacity buttons on the left is nothing more than trying to copy OSX :/".

I hope they have their own focus groups to back this up or something. Maybe they assume a Mac user is more likely to experiment and therefore more likely to try Ubuntu, so they would put the controls in their default place.

I'm not happy about that either. Otherwise, I think it looks fine.

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