I'll never understand how this can be deemed acceptable from an accessibility standpoint.
They wanted to copy macOS, but macOS somehow used to do it better (at least before Tahoe).
I disliked the black bars release(v3 I think) so much that I moved back to KDE and then also tried lxqt, xfce and i3 but never GNOME. If not for that release I would have probably been stuck with only GNOME and never try other options.
unfortunately much harder to avoid all GTK3+ apps
especially the cursed open/save dialogs, which are so bad I'd prefer the Windows 3.1 dialog
I have to admit that I do feel like an oldtimer though. What I do at the shell prompt, others do in VS Code, and probably 10x faster once they're good at the GUI. So maybe super-lightweight copy/paste at the shell prompt just doesn't matter that much any more.
That does affect later habits like, for example, hating the information overload from syntax highlighting. And don't even get me started on auto-indent.
Whereas younger colleagues, whose habits were formed in the era of much more sophisticated tools, have dozens of files open in tabs and can follow, say, a "where is this defined" or "where is this driven" (this is RTL code, not normal software) in an instant. Keep in mind some oldtimers had really fancy emacs setups that could do that, and vi users had things like ctags.
Oh I used CTRL+C to copy something but I need something copied first, highlight paste with middle mouse and paste with CTRL+P.
On Windows you must destroy the content of the CTRL+C and replace it with what the middle mouse can do, go back to the first source to copy and paste again.
Personally I heavily rely on the middle click to paste, especially with my docker workflows. Rather than having to click "CTRL+SHIFT+C" then "CTRL+SHIFT+V" every time, I just know whatever is highlighted will get pasted when I hit the middle click button. It's a subtle difference that saves maybe 1-2 seconds but combine that over the course of months and all of a sudden I've saved myself an hour with more efficient copy/paste.
My logic is if your hand is already on the mouse, it's going to be faster to paste with a mouse than your keyboard.
Some terminals have a mode where you can move the cursor around the history, and allow searching / copying / pasting. Alacritty and tmux come to mind, others may also implement something similar.
docker ps -a | grep image_name_or_whatever | awk1 | pbcopy (or xclip on linux)
to grab the container id and put it on the clipboard
Now I have a big problem with this: there is no good left-handed mouses on the market anymore, and symmetric mouses has right-handed buttons (and no thumb buttons like forward-backward or left-handed side). Buttons can be swapped in OS, but it messed up remote access like VNC or RDP to systems without swapped buttons... So, buttons must be swapped physically. No luck.
I was going to say Steelseries Sensei but it looks like those have been discontinued.
https://www.logitech.com/en-us/shop/p/m650-signature-wireles...
I have this one and use it, with software swapping, but each time I login to remote computer via RDP I need to un-swap in settings again and then back :-(
It is striking, that Logitech forgot how to make proper left-handed mouse. Their older models (discontinued for long time) were perfectly Ok!
Also, it very small for my hand. But better than nothing.
In Human factors engineering we have known for decades that some things that seem faster are really slower when you time it. We are taught early to never trust what someone says about time, always find an objective way to measure it.
And, somehow, that strategy seems to keep working decade after decade. Yeah, I don't get it either...
But yea, El Reg is never where you go for objectivity.
I cannot stand the Windows middle mouse user experience and always prefer the middle highlight and paste method.
(Formally, it makes handwavy sense: Having a clipboard with a history is basically a pushdown automaton, but having two of these in one box is not a PDA any more - it's something categorically more powerful, equivalent to a turing machine iirc).
Wouldn't it be great if we could have multiple named registers that we could paste from and even modify?
(vim enters the chat)
When you use gnome-tweaks there's a ton of "WARNING you may break things" and of course anything off the default path is likely to receive zero testing.
Personally I find middle click to paste one of the differentiators between MacOS, Windows, and Linux. I'm pretty surprised it's not more common. I was amused the iterm2 added select without having to type control-c.
must be a slow news day.
(Actually I have been playing with Omarchy recently a tiny bit, inspired by the absolutely devestatingly bad macOS update. Initial tire-kicking was very positive. They had a "universal copy-paste" feature that still seemed WIP at the time...i.e. didn't work everywhere...)
That's because it was an X11 thing, and everyone used X11.
You may be thinking of toolkits like Gtk+ or Qt which implement this behavior, but it is really just a convention shared by many desktop toolkits rather than anything defined by X11.
I'm very glad the option will remain for existing users.
It really isn't that black and white. Windows is more popular because it's forced on the majority of people, not because the way they do things is inherently better. Linux has and will do it's own thing and Windows will do whatever the trend to chase is.
I'm happy with that.
I read that as "everywhere on Linux", so those are irrelevant.
> which can make transitioning more friction-y than it needs to be.
What friction is added by it being possible to middle click paste?
Why are people like this? Will Gnome reach apotheosis when they have removed all buttons and boxes and you just get a shiny rounded rectangle to admire?
They will first make the proposal as a tik tok video, since they seem to avoid anything that will speed up interaction, like reading or having sooo many buttons on your input devices.
Remove Gnome ASAP because after they remove your ability to control anything on your computer you won't be able to remove it anymore.
Not that it wasn't possible before of course, but OS/distro dev across the entire stack surely spans an insane breadth and depth of knowledge.
I was already using Ubuntu with Gnome (the "flashback" version) and the XMonad tiling WM, but I've since ditched Gnome and switched to LXQt, and am pretty happy with it.
Then I installed Nix to override Ubuntu's aggressive Snap usage for applications like Firefox. (You can try to install it some other way, it'll just silently revert no matter how hard you try to configure it not to.)
Next step will be to eliminate Ubuntu entirely, because it's so focused on "end user" friendliness, it creates a terrible experience for anyone trying to customize their setup.
I'm very aware that I'm moving further and further off the "mainstream", but if the mainstream means "you will accept all our poorly thought-out and inefficient UI decisions", then there's not really a downside to that.
I agree that it can be teached more widely but then it is so fucking convenient, I think that 4/5 of my need of copy-paste are efficiently done like this.
Gnome has really this problem of young crappy devs that want to make a name by themselves by "breaking" something, like Google style. If they can't disrupt, then there is no fame.
And I would easily guess that this guy is running is Linux-gnome desktop from a MacBook...
Remind me when the idiots currently in charge at Ubuntu suddenly decided to put the closing buttons for windows in the upper left corner to mimic OSX. They knew better... then it was the beginning of the downfall for Ubuntu that no sane person will use anymore.
Very frustrating.
It's one of those remnants of ancient UX, like focus on hover.
> If we assume the Linux desktop has 4% market share, and assume the highly improbable fact that all of those 4% know how to use middle click paste and prefer it over the alternative autoscrolling, that's still 96% of users that are used to environments where autoscrolling is available and middle click paste doesn't exist
I don't know why they're using familiarity as an argument when GNOME has intentionally behaved completely differently from the Windows/Mac desktop for the past 15 years. I'm sure that having to launch software by clicking an unlabelled button on the top-left of the screen and then clicking the dots in the dock that appears on the bottom, or not having a visible overview of the windows onscreen without switching to fullscreen "activities mode", or not having any application status icons, or not being able to minimize windows, all cause more user confusion than middle click paste.
Of course all of this is completely fine. It's great that people are trying out new ways to use a computer, and I'm sure that there's lots of people that prefer the GNOME workflow. It's just that when you already have to re-learn how to use a desktop in order to use GNOME, I don't see the point in acting like middle click paste is a step too far.
Edit: I also saw an interesting point made by a KDE developer on the Linux Reddit board: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1q4viq9/disable_prim...
> Having an option is fine; we do in Plasma. They can have any default they want too, I don't care.
> What's bad is this MR doing it at a GTK level. It's that lack of even thinking about what inconsistencies that would cause for GTK apps running anywhere outside gnome and other toolkits running on Gnome that comes across quite badly.
> gsettings-desktop-schemas will be pulled in [on other desktops] as it's a reverse dep of many other things, including xdg-desktop-portal-gtk, which is required for use on all desktops to avoid having messed up GTK fonts in your flatpak apps.
"100% of Linux desktop users love middle-button paste, but we want to muddy the waters for those 25% of them who are stupid enough to use Gnome, our sponsors will reward us for it."
(Apologies to not Voltaire)
When using GNU/Linux VMs with desktop experience, I never use GNOME unless I am not able to change to XFCE, KDE, or even my oldie WindowMaker. e.g. I don't own the VM.
No idea what is their supposed target audience nowadays.
And you get people to use Linux by removing features that make Linux attractive in the first place? The mess that is Windows clipboard and cut/paste is what drove me to Linux when I started with it, and I've heard the same from other people too.
"Users of W don't know X" leads to "Let make our system like W" which is a ruse of an argument, that was pointed out already.
I encourage you to read the grandparent of your comment and specifically this quote (from ndiddy):
"I don't know why they're using familiarity as an argument when GNOME has intentionally behaved completely differently from the Windows/Mac desktop for the past 15 years."
Such appeal to conformity is indeed quite sad from GNOME.
malfist•1mo ago
inyourtenement•1mo ago
cdrini•1mo ago
> Ever since Linux got a graphical desktop, you could middle-click to paste – but if GNOME gets its way, that's going away soon, and from Firefox too.
But who knows, maybe it is a team decision, I don't know the internals or Jordan Petridis' role outside of "gnome dev".