Besides, middle click paste is an easter egg
Are you referring to the Freedesktop wiki as an authority? Did you bother to read that whole article?
Two paragraphs down, it says:
Application authors should follow the following guidelines to get correct behavior:
PRIMARYevery other desktop is handling the situation the same as GNOME
Seems blatantly false. Which desktops concretely?
In the support department of my company we usually follow this pattern while filling “standard” incidences:
It’s just a matter of efficiency. In the whole process we don’t need to use the keyboard at all, everything is done with the mouse in a few clicks.
No, im referring to the fact its largely unknown feature.
Xfce, Plasma and possibly everything else? Its an easter egg, its hard to tell user “hey, this thing exists”.
This changes… nothing?
No, im referring to the fact its largely unknown feature.
That’s not a fact, that’s hearsay. That feature universally existed for more than 40 years – that’s an actual fact. So it’s rather well known to people who have actually used a Unix desktop.
Xfce, Plasma and possibly everything else?
I’m currently on Plasma 6 and middle-click works as expected. I logged into Xfce the other day and in fact it works there too. At this point it seems rather obvious that you’re making stuff up.
So good to see how GNOME block any feedback in the merge request Disable primary-paste by default (!119) · Merge requests · GNOME / gsettings-desktop-schemas · GitLab and of course, they even merge it not listening to the community, that’s so nice from them
Hide per default a Linux exclusive nice feature is… really… wow
Hide per default is absolutely NOT to make it more accessible
That’s not what i meant nor I was responding to? I was responding to this:
Can you tell that to someone with hand tremors? Or other disability involving difficulties with moving hands?
I do not use the feature and I might like it being disabled by default. But I think this would be a non-issue for both long-time users and newcomers if there was a trivial way to change the setting through GUI. And this comes back the fact that tweaks, or enough gui-modifiable settings are not shipped with GNOME.
Many settings are not exposed in GNOME and if GNOME people really cared about windows-newcomers they’d try to expose more settings, instead of changing the default of a mostly irrelevant feature for them (they won’t even discover it cause it’s not exposed).
The hidden settings that can be modified only via the terminal or with tweaks are a much bigger turn-off for newcomers than the middle-click default. This default is irrelevant for them when compared to the much larger issues they face when interfacing with this DE for the first time.
How is it hard to explain? Just create a toggle in the settings like the one that already exists in tweaks and add a two-liner explanation: “Enabling this feature you can past your last selected text using the mouse middle button. Note that you do not need to copy the text, you just need to select it”
My description might not be 100% correct as I don’t use the feature, but it’s not that hard to come up with something simple.
Windows users are able to go to settings, understand and change them and personalize their desktops, if you expose the settings. They’re not dumb apes.
I am sure they will be livid if the feature is just disabled but not hidden.
I’ve been using this feature daily for 22 years. It’s one of the many things that have made Gnome a better desktop than what must use for work (Windows) where I often fall for the muscle memory despite not having middle click paste.
Of course I would have never imagined the need to explicitly praise at length this feature lest it be removed in haste. I hope the UX research behind this choice is solid - but the replies here and in Gitlab suggest otherwise in a very discomforting way 
Adding it to Settings is being discussed.
How would more preferences help? The point of not exposing too many preferences is to not “drown” users in needless settings.
Yeah, if it’s opt-out. What about if it’s opt-in (i.e. the status quo)?
Please be serious.
Its not being removed, just turned off by default.
It would help in avoiding the use of the terminal or tweaks (that they have to install) in order to change basic functionalities. There is a middle ground between the few settings GNOME has now and drowning users in needless settings. GNOME is very far from the middle ground and this is a much larger issue for newcomers. Claiming this default is being changed for unexperienced users is equivalent to voluntarily miss the forest for one very small tree.
I don’t understand what you are asking, it’s as easy to explain wether or not the toggle is on or off by default.
You mentioned people with disabilities to a person claiming the option should not be hidden by default. And people with disabilities would of course not care if the option is not hidden.
I’ve found this forum and signed-up just to make this comment. I don’t see the point in changing the default. Describing the feature as a ‘dumpster fire’ is worrying. It’s highly pejorative and dramatic, and betrays a rather bizarre mind-set. I fear that making the middle-click paste not the default is one step away from actually removing it. Bearing in mind that one frequent criticism of GNOME is that useful features are removed, it seems to me that you should not be looking to validate that criticism.
When was the last time some feature got removed? Serious question. And no, that’s slippery slope. There are loads of obscure settings in GNOME, if they aren’t touched, then feature this popular is going to be safe.
If something was basic, it would be a default behaviour.
ehhhh…
Okay there’s clearly some communication problem. I am talking about communicating the feature currently, as a default behaviour. I do not know how else to say this.
I literally saw several people with hand coordination problems having troubles with this feature, hence me saying it’s not an accessible default.
For laptops touchpads:
No physical middle mouse button
Slower or less precise access to right-click context menus
In that context, primary selection + middle-click paste (through touching 3 fingers on the touchpad) is often the fastest and sometimes only practical way to paste text without invoking menus or moving to the keyboard.
Yea, let’s pretend the vast majority of users do not need to install tweaks and extensions in order to have the possibility to modify have basic functionalities.
Yes there is a communicaiton problem, what is not clear to you about this:
What does the toggle’s default value have to do with the explanation? The feature can be explained next to the toggle, independently of whatever happens to be set.
If you meant how to communicate the choice of the default outside of the deskop UI. I don’t know, I agree with disabling it by default. However, in GNOME, “disabled” usually also means “hidden”.
My point is broader: this entire discussion would be a non-issue if basic settings were easily discoverable and adjustable through the GUI, but many of them aren’t. The very existence of Tweaks is evidence of that. The lack of exposed preferences is a far greater barrier for newcomers than something like middle-click paste. So we shouldn’t frame this as protecting new users, when the desktop already alienates them in far more significant ways.
Again communication problem: you did bring up people with disabilities answering to a guy that said hiding by default is not good for accessibility. Key word here is hiding. And I joked about people with tremors being livid if the feature is just disabled, but not hidden.
I’ve been using this feature daily for 22 years. It’s one of the many things that have made Gnome a better desktop than what must use for work (Windows) where I often fall for the muscle memory despite not having middle click paste.
Same here. I switched to GNU/Linux back when Vista launched, and the middle-click pasting is one of those “simply clever” features that made me love Gnome at the time (among other thing).
One of the arguments to disable it by default is that “new users aren’t used to it”. But I don’t think that making Gnome more like what already exist is the solution to convince new user to switch. GNU/Linux should celebrate its differences, not hide them.
I’m seeing a lot of people saying that this feature is not used by a lot of people… But where this data comes from ? AFAIK, Gnome doesn’t collect analytics, so there is no real way to know how much this feature is used or not.
Devs have obviously a bias view, as they are contacted by people having trouble with it while people like myself never had a reason to say “I use and love this feature” - until now.
I think this is why we’re seeing so much activity about this. Disabling it by default is just one step closer to remove it altogether. People are fearful that in 5, 10 years time, this feature is removed as Devs think “nobody use it” because people stayed silent on the matter.
“Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.”
– Henry Spencer
Until now (GNOME 49), middle click paste has been the default behavior. However, someone submitted a merge request, removed the possibility of getting feedback from users, and this merge was accepted before it could be discussed.
Instead of increasing the visibility of a very good feature… it is hidden and will be disabled by default, BRAVO!
You should take note that this change, on the surface, disables middle click only for GTK+ apps. Middle click would still work in other apps. So it breaks the consistency of desktop behavior, for old and new users alike.
When confronted with the fact that their change breaks the UX integrity of an otherwise consistent system, the only GNOME devs who commented here, Emmanuele Bassi @ebassi and Jordan Petridis @alatiera , withdrew from discussion, seemingly unable to provide any valid counter-arguments. For 24 hours I was hoping that they will reply pointing out that I was missing something, but it seems that I’m not.
And if these gentlemen are not convinced intuitively that a software system that behaves inconsistently (like in this case, with paste working in some GUI windows but not others) is not user-friendly, I can only point them to Fred Brooks’ seminal book The Mythical Man-Month, and the chapter about conceptual integrity.
To quote from the book: “Conceptual integrity is the most important consideration in system design."
With a distributed development model of the open source Unix GUI, people who intentionally act to break this integrity, expecting everyone else to follow their lead, while in reality are unable to form a valid sentence in a serious engineering discussion, will never have my respect.