Middle click paste is a very useful feature for a lot of people, but new linux users are not those people.
I personally switched two years ago, and got several people I know to switch too. Everyone I know who switched (including me) was confused by middle click paste.
It’s a hard to intuitively understand action (took me several months until I understood it took the selection for some reason) that is very easy to trigger accidentally, and that duplicates existing functionality.
The people who like it already know it exists, and could just toggle it on.
Of course, on distros not aimed at beginners, like say, debian, it should remain the default.
I’ve been using Linux off and on for decades, full time for over a year now, and only now learned this was a thing after I distro hopped to CachyOS and kept accidentally middle clicking on my laptop’s trackpad and getting shit pasted everywhere. I had to look up how to disable it because it was so annoying. I generally only middle click in web browsers for auto scroll and that’s extremely rare.
“New users” as you describe them don’t even know that the mouse wheel can be clicked at all. The only thing to be fixed is consistency with Ctrl-C clipboard.
Yeah, I accidentally posted an early draft of my furry midget vore age regression erotica novel I was working with on a discord channel and I caused the death of several fellow men due to dehydration as such is the magnitude of my writing. I wished these souls didn’t weight on me so harshly but I keep moving forward as progress doesn’t have ethics. A minute of silence for my wankers.
Honestly don’t know why people are up in arms and even posting about it. They aren’t saying they are removing the capability, just the default. Big whoop.
It’s Gnome. They do actually keep removing stuff that they disable by default, because they don’t even offer a GUI to configure these settings.
I’m guessing, those people are worried that it will be removed. It’s already somewhat on the line since Wayland started replacing X11, because individual desktop environments can now decide to implement it or not.
It’s been middle click paste since the 70s 80s maybe, so that you could do copy paste ad hoc without altering your clipboard content.
What might be better than turning it off is a onboarding screen that shows you how it works and you test it while the install completes.
I was under the assumption it was so you could copy/paste in the terminal. Highlight to copy, middle click to paste. Ctrl+c / ctrl+v are used by other things in the terminal already.
I think that is originally how it was used because GUI apps were less prevalent. But there is also Ctrl+Shift+C/V for terminal copy paste. And in Vi you have Y for yank and p and P for put. So many clipboards😱
What might be better than turning it off is a onboarding screen that shows you how it works and you test it while the install completes.
There’s a million more important things it could show you instead
Basic GUI interaction is paramount, the rest can be documentation
do copy paste ad hoc without altering your clipboard content.
Thing is modern clipboard managers like the one on kde server and equivalent purpose.
Oh I agree, but most windows users I know don’t even realize they have a clipboard manager for history pasting. So may not even be looking for that.
But from a UI perspective select text and middle click is just way less key strokes and fluid.
Grimly: “year of the linux desktop”
It is very easy to understand.
We should empower new users and show them better ways.
Is this not a thing in Windows? It’s such a wonderful convenience, and I swear I’ve always used it, but I guess I haven’t touched Windows in well over a decade at this point, so I can’t say I remember.
It’s not in windows. It’s also something that nearly every new user iv helped and taught to use Linux over the like 3 years has bitched about. And iv helped hundreds.
It’s been a pretty disliked feature for as long as I can remember for new users. I remember seeing it pop up rather frequently even back in ye olden times of fourms asking how to turn it off.
It’s just one of those old school things that people are use to so no one’s ever really questioned it. And being Linux there’s always been ways to turn off the feature.
Frankly Iv thought it should be disabled by default for like the last decade now. It’s a nice option but it does really make very little sense.
M3 is for panning and having it play double duty as a secondary clipboard is annoying.
Who is just going around middle clicking on text fields and getting confused?
Former Windows users who expect that to start scrolling. I remember that happening to me when I was new to Linux.
People actually use middle click floaty scroll? But it sucks really bad
I use it all the time in web browsers (Firefox/LibreWolf can do it even on Linux). I learned to use computers on Windows (mainly XP), so as far as I’m concerned, that has “always” been a thing, so why would I not use it.
laptop users misclicking the touchpad
if you think it’s gonna act the same as windows you can paste into something like discord by accident very easily
I’d be happier if they just fix whatever breaks click highlighting in the terminal. I hate that shit and I think it’s accidentally attempting to paste via Ctrl-V that does it so F my habitual ass.
No it doesn’t, because middle-click paste doesn’t interfere with any other function. There’s no downside to having it.
My mom kept accidently pressing the mouse button, I could never figure it out why, when I was watching I guess shed be conscious and use it properly, but complain later that things get pasted randomly. After I disabled middle click, she hasn’t complained.
I’ll also admit that I’ve been struggling to figure out why when I middle mouse click to open a new tab, that it opens a new tab that searches what was previously on my clipboard. It never occurred to me that middle click pasted outside of the terminal until I started seeing posts about the Firefox news
That’s not a problem with middle click paste, that’s a problem with Firefox. If you hit ctrl+v in Firefox does it search for whatever is in your clipboard? No, so why should it do that when you paste by mouse click?
… I actually like being able to copy a website and middle clicking to open it. I don’t think it’s a problem, it just needs to be telegraphed to the user better, and togleable.
I think pasting directly into “search and go” if you middle click in a browser is certifiably insane.
Maybe acceptable as “paste and go” if it recognizes the clipboard contents as a valid URL.
It has to be the same everywhere.
I am on opensuse aeon and I don’t care about the distro anymore. Same on atomic fedora.
Fedora can be used by noobs and pros, which setting should it be?
Most users don’t even know that you can click on it because it doesn’t look like a button. Touch screen doesn’t have it.
But it should only be replaced with something more useful.
