Friday, April 23, 2010

Fixing the Buttons in Ubuntu 10.4 Lucid Lynx

They moved my damn buttons.

In a move that can only be described as "mac envy" Canonical has has changed the position of the window control buttons from the right side of a window to the left in Ubuntu. You are probably reading this because, like me, you are none to psyched about this change.

after trying several suggestions part of the instructions here tipped me off.

What you want to do is run gconf-editor (just press alt + F2, type it in, and click OK) then navigate down to the entry for apps / metacity /general / button_layout.

If you are like me, you will want that key to say: menu:minimize,maximize,close

However try as I might, simply clicking and modifying the existing contents of that field never worked for me.

The trick? right click on button_layout, and select edit key. Edit the key there, and click OK. that should change it immediately and you will be all set.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

There is a script available from launchpad called "metacity window buttons". It allows you to change the button order graphically.

Jim said...

it is a shame that canonical refuses to see that people want customization, it is one of the reasons that they use ubuntu or linux.

unilateral decisions on changes like this, without easy "go back to the way it was" options are what apple does.

of course, it is starting to look like they want ubuntu to be apple more and more all the time.

A shame really