How to move window buttons to right in Ubuntu 16.04

If I understand you correctly and you are on (Vanilla) Ubuntu 16.04 with GNOME Shell installed (version 3.18.4) the following command should move the buttons to the right:

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.wm.preferences button-layout ':minimize,maximize,close'

To set them back, the command is:

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.wm.preferences button-layout 'close,maximize,minimize:'

At the moment there is not much that can be done to shift the window buttons to the right in a standard installation of Ubuntu Xenial Xerus. Since Trusty Tahr the handling of window decorations is no longer accessible from org.gnome.desktop.wm.preferences and is now handled by Unity itself. Alterations with tools such as the Tweak Tool or Dconf Editor in this area are no longer respected and will exasperatingly and silently be ignored.

So until someone can produce a suitable patch for the Unity source code, and I would personally welcome such a patch, we are stuck with buttons to the left.

References:

• Launchpad: Can no longer move windows controls to the right (16.04) - gsettings has no effect now
• Launchpad: Window Controls not functioning.

Hmmm... Interesting. I was thinking... I'm on 16.04. I'm also on gnome-shell 3.18. But my window buttons are on the right.

Lightbulb, when reading the comments: Oh, I'm on Ubuntu GNOME, rather than Ubuntu vanilla.

If you wanted to use Ubuntu as distro and Gnome Shell as the DE (as I also prefer), you'll have a better Gnome experience by installing the Ubuntu GNOME flavor instead. So why not give it a try? The base distribution will just be the same anyways.