Bug 82173

I have looked at the theme and I don't see where it is an issue. Other themes I
have tried also have the same problem. 

If you know of a specific theme where it works properly, please let me know
which one it is.

Havoc can probably tell you more about this. I don't know of any Metacity 
themes that do this correctly, yet. Check out the bugzilla.gnome.org thread 
and if you have a Windows box around you can check out the desired behaviour.

Yes, I know the concept. It falls under "Fitts' Law".

KDE's developer site has more info on it:
http://developer.kde.org/documentation/design/ui/fittslaw.html

If a window is maximized and a panel is not at the top of the screen, then you should be able to 
slam the mouse infinitely in the direction of the button (especially to close the window) and be 
over the button to close the window.

Of course, this principle is not carried out for either Mac OS (OS X included) or Windows (95 and 
up). Also, it is an irrelevant concept if you do not run with everything maximized. Most people 
have resolutions at 1024x768 and higher. I doubt that all programs would all be maximized at 
1024 or higher.

Still, having a needless border around buttons is not great.

I don't know about MacOS, but Windows definitely follows Fitts' Law in this 
respect. I work in both environments, Windows and GNOME, and very much miss 
this feature in Bluecurve (or Metacity, dep. on where the change is needed).

And, I use 1024x768 on a couple of boxes and do maximize most applications 
(like my web browser and my e-mail client) so you can't just assume that 
people don't maximize their windows anymore. :)

To work around this I've added <border name="button_border" left="1" right="0" 
top="0" bottom="2"/> in the "normal maximized" section in metacity-theme-1.xml.

Of course it would have been nicer with the same functionality without 
changing the appearance, but while waiting for that this is good enough for me.

Red Hat apologizes that these issues have not been resolved yet. We do want to
make sure that no important bugs slip through the cracks.

Red Hat Linux 7.3 and Red Hat Linux 9 are no longer supported by Red Hat, Inc.
They are maintained by the Fedora Legacy project (http://www.fedoralegacy.org/)
for security updates only. If this is a security issue, please reassign to the
'Fedora Legacy' product in bugzilla. Please note that Legacy security update
support for these products will stop on December 31st, 2006.

If this is not a security issue, please check if this issue is still present
in a current Fedora Core release. If so, please change the product and version
to match, and check the box indicating that the requested information has been
provided.

If you are currently still running Red Hat Linux 7.3 or 9, please note that
Fedora Legacy security update support for these products will stop on December
31st, 2006. You are strongly advised to upgrade to a current Fedora Core release
or Red Hat Enterprise Linux or comparable. Some information on which option may
be right for you is available at http://www.redhat.com/rhel/migrate/redhatlinux/.

Any bug still open against Red Hat Linux 7.3 or 9 at the end of 2006 will be
closed 'CANTFIX'. Again, if this bug still exists in a current release, or is a
security issue, please change the product as necessary. We thank you for your
help, and apologize again that we haven't handled these issues to this point.

Being worked on upstream:
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=97703