As the Ubuntu’s new tag line says “It’s time for a change.”, indeed a lot of change has been implemented to the operating system, applications and the interface. There are few which you will find it interesting and useful and while few others might annoy you because of a sudden change.

I never liked Ubuntu much, and it seems many people are complaining against it saying that the move to have the buttons at the left hand side (close, maximize, minimize) like we have in Apple OS was a bad one. People find the sudden shift hard to come to terms with.

Tell you what, it’s extremely easy to move the buttons back to the right hand side. All you need is a bit of configuration tweaking from Gnome Configuration Editor and you are done. To begin, open gconf-editor. Either type it in terminal and hit enter or press Alt+F2 and run it from there.

Once you open gconf-editor, navigate to

/apps/metacity/general

You can see the top class ‘app‘ in the left hand pane. Now navigate to the path mentioned above. Then, in the right hand pane, change the value of the key button_layout from

close,minimize,maximize:menu

to

menu:minimize,maximize,close

You can either right click the key value and edit it, or just double click it and start typing. Once you have changed the value, hit the enter key and that’s it. All the windows will now have buttons on the right.

There is still one problem however, as you can see, the graphics used for the buttons are not the same for all 3 buttons, so they look a bit weird. You can either change the theme, or change the graphics for the buttons to get a smoother blending.