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.
Another take: the discussion shows that quite a lot Linux users use this feature because it makes them more productive. If that feature is hidden away new users will probably never find it. Linux is not the same as Windows (which is why people flock to it right now in the first place) and thus has a learning curve. And I think that’s ok. We don’t have to make it more like Windows, people have to learn how to use it.
Like I kept surprising coworkers on windows with “witchcrafty” key combinations like ctrl+c, win+d, ctrl+s…? The middle clic paste would be roughtly as well hidden as those arcane shortcut. If users won’t “discover” it, better not let them paste random stuff unknowingly at least.
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.
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.
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.
No, what actually makes sense is a proper unification of different copy/paste buffers that is nowadays still mostly improvised and only achieved through very different 3rd party tools (for me using the panel from xfce it’s xfce4-clipman for example that keeps highlighting text and middle-click buffers synchronised with ctrl-c/ctrl-v or ctrl-insert/shift-insert…).
The problem is not accidently pasting something with a middle-click, but not knowing what is in one buffer, what is in another one and which one a program is using.
Having the buffers separate is useful because you can have two different things copied at the same time.
This is remedied for me by the clipboard history in the system tray in KDE. I can have a lot of things in my clipboard and access any one of them whenever I want
Sure, there is a usecase for this. But sperate buffers and varying (and often unintuitive) behavior of software and which buffer is used how is a much bigger hurdle for people not used to it than that “middle-click pasting is confusing” bullshit…
It is very easy to understand.
We should empower new users and show them better ways.
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.
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.
Is this why I can’t middle-mouse scroll in chromium browsers (works on Firefox based) on Bazzite? I’ve used Linux for over a decade (although mostly without a DE on servers until a couple of years ago) and I’ve never realised middle-mouse pastes.
It definitely should be left off by default.
Grimly: “year of the linux desktop”
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.
