Minimize Icon Misleading in Unity

Its a symbolic and widely recognized icon. I am not sure replacement will be clearer.

Merk: any idea what the more general solution for GNOME Shell is; perhaps we can have something compatible that gets several use-cases with one fix?

Paul: I'm not sure what you mean.
As I said, changing the icon to a vertical line or dot (left-aligned) works for GNOME Shell as well. Given in the Overview, the running applications/shortcuts look similar to that of Unity's.

Merk: what solution are other themes using with regard to GNOME3 Shell. Are other themes switching to a vertical bar? It might make sense to have some standardisation.

For GNOME Shell there is a discussion about dropping the minimize button iteslf.

Why did we drop the down and up oriented arrow heads from Lucid in favour of the current icons? I would have thought they'd be easier to understand than the ones we have now.

I don't know the official reason, but for Unity it makes sense because the windows aren't going down, they're going left.

As for the consistency with GNOME Shell, in later mockups it seems they might be getting rid of Maximize as well. So Maximize/Unmaximize would be open for Unity. Granted that is another 'bug' if we chose to change that icon to reflect the global menu behavior.

I've attached a quick mockup of how the minimize button would look on the left as well as centered (since the minimize button is currently centered)
It also contains an icon for unmaximize, but again that would be another bug.

Since this got a status change, I'll also say that as of the most recent build of GNOME Shell, both the minimize and (un)maximize buttons are gone.

The minimize icon looks like a minus (−) sign, which corresponds to "minimize" action, so the current variant is OK. Aslo, the vertical line will not be understood by most of users, and the horizontal is very familiar for other-DE users.

@Chris: the "down arrow" means that the window will be minimized to the bottom panel, but Unity has a panel on left.

BEcause the minus sign (−) is centered in the button and not placed at the bottom, it does not convey "minimizing down". The minus is placed in a neutral position, so it is still valid no matter where your launcher is, at the left or at the bottom.

If the icon were a vertical line, I would think that the button is for semi-maximizing, or something more confusing. Anyway, these are symbolic, metaphoric icons, I don't believe that they must represent the exact desktop. And I don't know about anybody who got confused by the minimize icon, all of my friends clicked the minus expecting to minimize the window, and that ocurred.