Customizing Cinnamon window buttons

I decided to daily-drive Cinnamon for a while. It’s been good to me so far, but I was missing one option that I was used to from other environments.

Apparently, Cinnamon used to have options for customizing window buttons in the settings, but it was removed in Linux Mint 19.3 (theoretically for the reason of simplifying the options). So we can change whether the buttons are on the left or right side, but we can’t add or remove individual buttons.

I personally like to remove the maximize button. I’ll have to install dconf-editor to do it. Should I keep explaining how to install stuff? Is anyone reading these?

Arch-based:

pacman -S dconf-editor

If you’re using Mint (or another Debian-based distro):

sudo apt install dconf-editor

Once installed and launched, the path in dconf-editor is:
org / cinnamon / desktop / wm / preferences / button-layout

Click on that and go down to the bottom. Untoggle “Use default value” and set the “Custom value.” Think of the colon as the title in the center. In my case, the text to use was “:minimize,close” because screw the menu button as well.

Thanks to this thread in the Mint forums.

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