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.
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😱
There’s a million more important things it could show you instead
Basic GUI interaction is paramount, the rest can be documentation
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.