I’ll give Unity a go one day, but for now I’m persisting with Gnome 2 on my work PC, because I have it set up with the GUI staying out of my way as much as possible, so for now it is the path of least annoyance.

At least now that I have worked out how to fix one of Ubuntu’s annoying allusions to OS X of having Gnome position the minimize, maximize and close buttons on the left corner of window borders. Like most people, I still have to use Windows, and I see no need to have to mentally acclimatize to this arbitrary difference between the 2 operating systems I regularly use.

To change the position of the window controls to the right, run the Configuration Editor by pressing Alt-F2 then typing gconf-editor.

Navigate to:

apps/metacity/general

Find the button_layout setting.

Change the value to:

menu:minimize,maximize,close