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Comment by dilap | Hacker News Reader

Haven't used Linux in forever, but middle-click to paste was like the one thing that consistently worked everywhere. So it makes some sense that someone want to break it somewhere. With enough fingers meddling all conventions are broken. Wisdom of the crowds. Democracy.

(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...)

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> Haven't used Linux in forever, but middle-click to paste was like the one thing that consistently worked everywhere.

That's because it was an X11 thing, and everyone used X11.

X11 doesnt really define those things. Policy, not mechanism.

While X11 didn't define it, the defaults were such that it would be harder to write a program that didn't do that then one that did in many cases.

Not at all. Unless you specifically coded this handler for the middle button and wrote code for fetching selections and all, you would not get this behavior. It would be easier for the middle button to do nothing.

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.

X heavily relied on the primary and secondary selections for performing operations in lieu of an explicit clipboard. It is built into the protocol. The only policy is where that paste binding defaulted to.

X doesn't even enforce primary or secondary selections, they have no special meaning to the protocol. What is built on the protocol is this mechanism to do clipboard-like things. Even how many actual clipboard thingies you have is policy and not builtin into the protocol.

"Everywhere" except Windows and Mac, which can make transitioning more friction-y than it needs to be. As Windows users continue to exodus it makes sense to me to tune onboarding for brand-new users from other OSes instead of other Linux distros.

I'm very glad the option will remain for existing users.

I've never liked this take that "Linux should be like Windows to take windows' market"

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.

> "Everywhere" except Windows and Mac,

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?

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