As a long term Fedora contributor and former Ambassador, once the main features I display to everyone was the middle-click paste. It seems that the Gnome project really hates old users, and now they not only have proposed but implemented the disabling of the middle-click paste.
This change seems to come from Mozilla, but it looks to me like a devolve of a great feature, that it’s really useful when troubleshooting and getting help online (select and paste into the terminal)
This is specially a problem when you’re using flatpak applications since not always the apps have clipboard access (I’ve experienced this even in firefox from flatpak), and selecting and middle-click paste do the trick.
I know a lot of you know me because I’m still using X11 and they say “this is a X11-ism”, even the Gnome ticket finishes “Goodbye X11”. But this is not about X11, it’s about a useful feature that it’s being changed in the wrong way, you should not “benefit a few confused” by “killing the hundreds that uses it”
My $0.02: I spent years accidentally pasting sensitive data into websites due to this feature. Didn’t notice until imgur.com started displaying error messages each time my paste failed. Requiring that users run gsettings set once to enable it seems like a pretty reasonable way to continue supporting the feature for users who want it, while rationalizing the default behavior for everybody else.
That’s just a bug, then. There is absolutely no valid technical reason for an app to have access to the “normal” clipboard and not also the primary (middle click) clipboard.
Sure something from gnome development was to defend it, and there it goes my possibility to get this advancing. Well, another disable-by default that I have to live with.
Absolutely true, but while solved, gnome is going to get rid to the fastest native workaround.
By the way, don’t take this the wrong way, I’m not attacking you in any way, but if you keep middle clicking by mistake, go to the doctor, you may have a problem with your nervous system.
Personally think this should be a configurable setting within Gnome Settings instead of a terminal command.
I’m not really too bothered about the change in general since it’s not something I really ever use, only ever use middle click to open & close browser tabs but still seems a bit weird it’s remove without a GUI method to restore.
It explains quite well that after decades of pasting with the middle button, “someone” started to use it for mouse gestures, and for the “years” after, that change lead to confusion because the same button could do different things on click vs drag.
This is self-commenting.
Next-up:
CTRL key considered harmful. Just think of CTRL+v and the like.
I understand it’s frustrating for those using this feature, mainly long-time Linux users, to have it removed. But those same users will easily find the one-line command to re-enable it.
Personally, I’m ok with GNOME often challenging the status quo of desktop usage.
EDIT: I am not against this proposal, just wanted to share a different view on the subject.
Perhaps a better idea is during OOBE setup, prompt if the user wants to enable it?
This is clearly one of those features where people either hate it or love it.
Because disabling it by default makes more logical sense than keeping it enabled by default.
There are two types of users, those who want middle-click to paste, and those who don’t (which includes people who wouldn’t even think of this feature).
Those who do want it kept are likely people who have enough experience with a Linux system to be able to easily figure out how to turn it back on like yourself (minimal friction). Because it is a feature that pretty much only exists on Linux and it comes from the X11 days.
Those who don’t want it either will be a) experienced users who just don’t want it, who would be happy with it turned off by default, or b) inexperienced users who would have trouble figuring out how to turn it off (for example users converting from other OSes like macOS/Windows/etc where this is not a thing). Which includes people accidentally pasting in sensitive info as @catanzaro mentioned. Especially since we currently have to install Gnome Tweaks, which for a lot of users would feel incredibly strange (“Why would a system setting not be something that comes with my system?”), OR use the CLI to control system config, which again is not something inexperienced users would feel comfortable with doing most likely.
tl;dr - for people who want it, the fix to re-enable it has minimal friction, and for people who wouldn’t expect the behaviour to begin with, a huge subset of them wouldn’t have enough experience with Linux systems enough to know how to disable it.
The best decision is always the one that minimises friction for the largest number of people.
You’re assuming that those who don’t know about it won’t want to use it. That’s false assumption, as well as it’s false to assume that all users who uses this feature are advanced users. It’s like for me to assume that an user that presume to be “long time users of linux” knows this feature, knows how to disable it and knows how to use its OS.
The same could be said about the minimise and maximise buttons or the position of them, but well, like I said, we just have to live with the “disable-by-default” instead of the customisation power that suppose to come with linux.
This is your opinion, I respected, but I totally disagree. If we keep only “the minimal friction” we wouldn’t have KDE, XFCE, MATE and Cinnamon, and I just keeping the examples on the desktop, but well we wouldn’t even have FLOSS if RMS was just “well, a lot of people is ok with the printer, we should just go and un-jam it”.
Right now, I know I’m one of the last that care about the traditional things that makes Linux fast and awesome, and that doesn’t mean that I’m against changes, it just means that some features are affecting my workflow and the new things are only adding more and more and more weight on my initial setup, and I’m certainly sure that I’m not the only one.
For better or worse, both the technical skill and the average Linux user themselves are both changing. Linux is trending toward being friendly toward users who don’t open a command line, and the average skill level of the user when it comes to fixing bugs is also decreasing. They tend to come from other Operating Systems that they might have used for perhaps decades, where the idea of a middle click to paste is bizzare at best.
I’d argue the ability to turn it back on proves your point about the customisation power of Linux. This is just arguing about default settings. There’s a lot of default settings I disagree with on Linux, on every DE and distro, but since having to set up a fresh install is so rare I just deal with it.
People who were implementing mouse gestures messed up here.
But we are lucky (quoting you, ):
OK, I managed to change WebKit to paste on button release rather than on button press.
This was an implementation bug, it got solved, let’s move on and not use it as a justification to disable a feature.
(I guess those things come around every few years. IIRC, around the time GNOME was being ported to Wayland there were huge announcements that the middle mouse button is incompatible with Wayland and whatnot. Then somehow silently it turned out not be a problem and things started to work as before. I hope we repeat that pattern this time too.)
Well, this caused GNOME to invent the primary-selection protocol that all desktops implement for this to work on Wayland. That’s why all the hullaballoo went away. The issue here is that GNOME is disabling this without providing a first-class method to turn it back on in GNOME Settings.
It is effectively impossible to figure out how to get it back unless you know how GNOME’s settings system works and know how to tweak the necessary gsettings or you install GNOME Tweak Tool to have a visual representation of the settings that should be in GNOME Settings anyway.
But it will still paste if you fail to activate the gesture. The status quo is unacceptable. I would say it’s an Epiphany bug rather than a desktop bug, but it’s something to consider.
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