How-To Geek has the clearest article I've found yet on moving the title bar buttons in Ubuntu.
Every other article I've read glossed over or seemed to miss the importance of having the button entry start with "menu:" followed by "minimize,maximize,close" in the value. It wasn't immediately obvious on my first attempt that the colon separated left corner from right corner content (meaning everything was still stuck on the left at the time).
I know there's an ongoing flame war on the topic of button placement. Now that I have access to a Mac and have experienced the jolt of learning new button positions, I know why it can be done on a Mac and yet is a total disaster for me on Ubuntu. On a Mac, the application menus are all moved to the top of the screen instead of under the window title bar. You have to aim pretty carefully to close the window on a Mac. Overshooting it just means pulling up that apple menu. On Windows and most Linux desktops though the menu bar is there on the left and overshooting it normally means clicking the application icon by mistake. Annoying, but nothing too bad.
Ubuntu's 10.04 default settings now make it so if you are in a hurry, aging to the point of losing some of your fine motor control (or too young to have finished developing it), or just have a jumpy mouse, you could close your window by mistake when you were really trying to click File then Print. (For those of you thinking of office documents verifying the close, I direct you to Google Docs via web browser.)
