You can actually turn off the app icon in the theme, if you want (not that that’s quite what you were asking for).

That way, I’d be able to emulate the Motif window manager (my all-time favourite) with Metacity.

Here, here.

It is a terrible idea, and one that goes against the general feel of GNOME.

This is not Windows. Windows is not the ultimate say in “doing things the right way”. As a matter of fact, most people would probably rank it high up in the “doing things the lousiest way possible” list.

If people want to close the window from the right side, how about this ?

Customization option allowing windows to switch their menu and buttons’ positions, allowing for most mac-wannabes/mac-deserters to get naturally what they usually tweak otherwise.

If you want an option for it, I can’t say I’m dead against it .. Just don’t go getting too kaydee’ee’ie on us =)

*nods* that was pretty much the consensus here, I think.

If it’s not configurable I don’t think you should do it.

Atleast in my opinion, you should not default behaviour to much.

Okay, so there is interest among Ubuntu users. Please go to Launchpad and raise a bug against Ubuntu’s packaging of Metacity and ask them to include the patch, and if they do we can consider it further here. If they do, we can consider whether we’ll include it upstream. There will not be a GConf switch for reasons I have explained.

Thus, there seems to be an interest for it.

My personal opinion is: I agree with a lot of people who say, I doubt anyone would accidentally close a window this way, there are easier ways to do this. Also a good application should ask the user if he/she would like to save his work.

If a patch is to be accepted, I think it should have a new configuration option to enable/disable it. And the default should be disabled.

Thus it will not change current behaviour, but it will be something people can turn on if they really want it. I know it’s probably a compromise, but I’m fairly certain it does satisfy pretty much everyone.

Having an invisible way to close a window doesn’t seem sane at all, not because of a negative effect of it being there, but because there is no positive reason to put it there in the first place. When placing any button or clickable space, the first thought should be that the user know exactly what that button will do when they see it, and that if they want to invoke the function of the button they will be able to find it.*

This sort of precludes having close buttons hidden beneath icons that could look at any one time like any one thing, surely?

I say “no” to pandering to old, silly ways of doing things and “yes” to finding new, better ways that all people can use- because they make sense- not ways that only some people can use because they happen to have seen something similar before.

*It’s for this reason, in fact, that I don’t have the application’s little picture displayed in that space- I use a theme that puts a button that looks like a drop-marker there to make it more obvious a menu is invoked. I already have the application’s icon in the window list, thank-you-very-much.