Turn on minimize and maximize buttons in Gnome Tweak

Pop! OS – Where are the minimize and maximize buttons on my windows?

I really love the clean and minimal aesthetics of Pop! OS, but sometimes it seems they (or should I say the Gnome 3 UX team?) have gone too far. My windows are missing the minimize and maximize buttons, I can only close them? What can I do?

Gnome Tweaks will save us again of course…

If you haven’t installed it yet, just open up the terminal and type:

sudo apt-get install gnome-tweaks

Launch Gnome Tweaks and navigate to the Window Titlebars tab to turn the missing buttons back on.

3 thoughts on “Pop! OS – Where are the minimize and maximize buttons on my windows?

  1. As far as I can tell Pop!_OS users are supposed to utilize the ancient Linux “workspaces” feature. Clicking “Activities” in the top-left corner or pressing the windows button brings up app shortcuts on the left and workspaces on the right side of the screen. Then you simply click which workspace you want (or a new one). You can get really fast at switching apps after you get used to it. This is a bit like minimizing as it gets rid of what you had on the screen without closing it. Some people like workspaces because you can have one for every type of activity to keep them separate. People that have always worked within a single workspace minimize everything, and if that describes you it makes sense that you’d prefer a minimize button (I guess that’s obvious). I have to admit I’ve never come across the minimize button getting 86’d though. I’m not sure if it’s revolutionary or just really weird. I’ve gotten used to the default Pop!_OS settings though; anyone could if they choose to stick it out. But I don’t blame you if you just want to add the dang minimize button.

  2. well they were already on and I have some apps with min max close buttons and some that don’t have any of those WTH???? Apps like ICQ and Thunderbird Email .. no buttons

    1. To my understanding, if your distribution (like Pop! OS) uses Gnome 3 as the desktop environment only apps that use GTK3 widget toolkit are guaranteed to look like a native app. For example if you use Google Chrome, the min/max/close buttons might have a different style than the native file manager app.

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