I truly hope, even pray, that I'm not offending any delicate sensibilities by asking this question on this forum -- I tried to go directly to "recurring discussions" but the site won't let me start a thread there.

I'm trying hard to understand what the design consideration is, for forcibly imposing on users the placement of buttons, that has been practically universally accepted on the opposite side since the invention of modern GUIs. Yes, yes, yes, there are other DEs around, nobody is forcing anything, I know, I'm familiar with that prevarication, but I'm trying to understand this DE, and the conscious decision to invest time and effort in coding restrictions to already working and existing tools (e.g. dconf-editor and several others) that always have allowed users to place window control buttons where they thought they belonged, on an OS that prides itself on being completely configurable by the end user.

This is not new, and too many Ubuntu users have been gritting their teeth with every new release since Lucid LTS (oh how I loved it) reconfiguring this to their liking, as it invariably flipped it on them.

The closest I've been able to find to an explanation, is this, from Mark Shuttleworth:
Moving everything to the left opens up the space on the right nicely, and I would like to experiment in 10.10 with some innovative options
there
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...3/comments/110

That's nice. Not to be facetious, but moving everything to the right opens up the space on the left just as nicely. Kudos for experimenting with innovative options, but what reason is there for such options never to be on the left instead?

This is also very nice of Mr. Shuttleworth:
...I encourage folks who prefer that layout to use it, or to follow the instructions for setting the gconf preference manually. It's great that you can do that.
Encourage, that is, until the option is removed.

What could it be? What is the UI wisdom or zen behind this?

Could it have anything to do with user instinct, due to the fact that we write from left to right? I should hope not, given that there are close to a Billion people in the world using right-to-left languages that are supported in Ubuntu (at least as far as I'm able to glean from data in the CIA World Factbook), and I'm sure anyone as sensible as Mr. Shuttleworth would not want to offend them. Certainly not when his programmers remove the ability to represent keyboard layouts by country flags, "because the Union Jack would not be appropriate in India, for instance," as has been stated in such fora as askubuntu and so on.

Why leave it open to speculation? A clear explanation of the reason behind it, of why it is so critical as to get programmers to go out of their way to remove that flexibility, would be most welcome.