“Others” being GNOME developers that are privy to the issues raised by people that have been hit by this unexpected behaviour being enabled by default over the years.
The only embarrassing thing, here, is your constant “it works for me, I have opinions, listen to me” response. You could have stopped at the first comment.
I advise you to just read comments here. None is a gnome developer and they decide based on their own experience. Also, what you imply here is that we have to accept others opinions that want to make gnome to appeal to themselves. And it goes beyond embracing coming from GNOME dev here.
The people replying here may not by GNOME developers, but in that case they are also not going to be the ones making a decision about the default state of this functionality, so who are you trying to convince, here?
You can make a point—once—but there are no expectations that the GNOME developers will do what you want. They are the ones making the desktop. The only way for you to have actual influence in the decision making process is to become a GNOME developer. GNOME developers read and listen to feedback, if stated respectfully, but we’re not beholden to whoever shouts loudest or longest.
Changing the default right now would introduce inconsistencies, because at the moment it’s not possible to fully disable the middle-click paste feature: Wayland compositor ignores 'gtk-enable-primary-paste' setting (#3744) · Issues · GNOME / mutter · GitLab
Changing the default has no bearing as to whether applications that use their own environment and don’t listen to the system settings will honour it. I suspect the change in default might even lead to applications being changed to conform.
The inconsistency exists because this behaviour is not handled systematically, but it’s part of each application’s own implementation. Welcome to Linux.
I’m not arguing against this change in general. It just seems odd to me to change the default setting when GNOME’s own compositor (Mutter) still hardcodes the protocol to be active, ignoring that very setting.
Not that no one uses it (there are people using it, i know a couple of them now), the point is that linux newcomers dont.
Note it was fixed recently in Chromium Chromium
no one. just making my point on the matter.
I made my point. Didn’t really expected GNOME devs to listen as in years they didn’t.
If you(devs) were reading wouldn’t bash me for speaking out of my own experince while others keep doing the same thing.
As far as I can see everything said and mentioned here was and is with respect to everyone.
Then there is the option of disabling it.
Why should the default behaviour change?
To be accessible and less confusing to more people.
Not sure why Mr. Petridis in his MR calls middle-mouse paste-primary “an X11ism” and says “Goodbye X11”.
Using mouse button 2 as “paste-primary” is a long-standing convention adopted by almost every nix GUI application, and every widget toolkit in history. Since it’s a policy selected by the application (including widget toolkits), it’s not enough to change the default for GTK+ applications if GNOME wants to have behavior that is consistent between all apps.
I would find it more problematic if I log into the GNOME shell only to find that middle-click paste works in some apps but not in others.
So my question for Mr. Petridis is: is the intended behavior, to have middle-click disabled only for GTK+ applications, other applications (for example, any Xlib or Xaw app) retain their behavior? Because this is what this MR seems to do, and my 2c is that I wouldn’t appreciate inconsistent behavior between applications on my desktop.
And I hope it’s obvious that “when using GNOME you should not use any Xaw or Motif or … (the list is long)” is a pretty radical stance for a desktop environment to take.
While this feature has nothing to do with X11 and Xorg itself, its often associated with it cause of the existence of the multiple clipboards. The functionality has always been implemented client side on the applications and as such there is little that can be done.
Applications can do whatever they want. They can even implement this functionality regardless of what GTK does.
This is about how GNOME will behave by default, and having the paste-on-middle click enabled is a bad default.
Welcome to Linux
I hope you are at least aware that the convention we’re discussing here predates Linux and has nothing directly to do with Linux.
Linux users expect “middle-click copies PRIMARY selection” to work in all apps. Saying “Welcome to Linux” doesn’t explain why breaking that convention is acceptable.
I’m in favor of this change. I would rather have navigation be the primary focus of mouse in general.
The inconsistency exists because this behaviour is not handled systematically, but it’s part of each application’s own implementation.
@ebassi Saying that “inconsistency exists” is patently false. As @jreiml clearly pointed out, the inconsistency does not exist today – all apps behave consistently, and the primary-paste behavior has been carefully kept consistent by generations of developers, apps and widget toolkits. It’s a de facto standard. Your proposed change would create an inconsistency by breaking this convention.
It is probably safe to say that newcomers to Linux/Gnome will have several things they will have to learn to use it effectively; middle-click paste would just be one of those things. They don’t even have to use it. If they don’t know about it, then it is really a discovery issue in Gnome.
Sadly, I suspect that no amount of debating will change anyone’s mind. If there is data supporting the change beyond “it is bad design,” which is subjective, then share it. Otherwise, this is just another step backwards for power users with the justification that Windows users can’t learn new things.
Firefox have this, and in order to use it middle-click paste needs to be disabled.
No, that’s not true. And mozilla has just closed their merge request about this.
I cannot believe what I am reading here …
Have you ever considered discussing such changes with the community beforehand, before proclaiming them as unchangeable?
This is so 100% true!
Except vast majority of linux users were once using Windows, and everyone started out somewhere, i do not appreciate your words here. Also, i guess im not a power user anymore 
Besides, middle click paste is an easter egg, and every other desktop is handling the situation the same as GNOME. It’s just not something thats easy to explain (because giving pop-up about how it works isnt great).
I was talking about autoscroll.