I have been testing Elementary OS and as much as I love it I feel it is missing a few small things to really make it a great OS. There are some things that I sometimes feel some developers overlook, one of them being a minimize function for a desktop OS? Not really sure why something like that would not be included by default… Well not a huge deal, luckily there is a way to kind of fix this issue.
Run the following commands in a terminal window to install the Elementary OS Tweak tool
sudo apt-add-repository ppa:versable/elementary-update
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install elementary-tweaks
Once you have gone through the install click on System Settings and you should see a new icon that says Tweaks.
Click on Tweaks and in the Appearance menu you should see a Button Layout drop down, select which type of setup you would like for your buttons and that should give you what you are looking for… a minimize window function.
It doesn’t seem to take effect on everything though… for example I am writing this on Google Chrome browser and it looks like it did not add the minimize function to Chrome. I will continue to investigate to see if there is a way to add it to everything.
UPDATE: I have found the solution to the Chrome browser issue I was having, if you right-click the title bar there is an option to Use system title bar and borders select that and you will get the option to minimize Chrome as well!