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Comment by shevy-java | Hacker News Reader

It's still a change. GNOME dictates onto users what the developers think the users should use or have. I find that not acceptable.

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I once watched a co-worker completely bork a customer system by accidentally middle-clicking while moving his mouse after copying an ls -l of /usr/bin (where pretty much everything was a symlink to the real executables in /bin).

Yeah, he shouldn't have been logged in as root, but the point remains that middle-mouse paste can be extremely dangerous and fat-finger-prone.

I love Linux, but the cut and paste situation is really terrible. The middle mouse paste isn't a problem for me--it's that there are two separate "clipboard" buffers, which just causes all sorts of problems.

You can unify the middle mouse selection and the regular clipboard in KDE if you wish. Personally I find keeping them separate very convenient.

I use "autocutsel" to synchronize the cut buffer and clipboard in X. Not sure what Wayland might need to do this or if it even has a similar concept.

I love select to copy and middle-click to paste.

https://www.nongnu.org/autocutsel/

There are a number of DE-independent clipboard managers that can do that as well as other features, like keeping a clipboard history so you can copy in series then paste in series, or having keyboard shortcuts transform the clipboard contents by way of a command, so you can e.g. copy some multi-line text then paste it as a single line joined by spaces.

Having two separate clipboard buffers is a feature I intentionally use.

https://xkcd.com/1172/

Except it's not a bug that found use. It's intentional behavior. From https://specifications.freedesktop.org/clipboard/latest/:

> The rationale for this behavior is mostly that [having a unified clipboard] has a lot of problems, namely:

> - inconsistent with Mac/Windows

> - confusingly, selecting anything overwrites the clipboard

> - not efficient with a tool such as xclipboard [(tool that maintains a history of specifically CLIPBOARD; it would be messy to keep a history of all selections)]

> - you should be able to select text, then paste the clipboard over it, but that doesn’t work if the selection and clipboard are the same

> - the Copy menu item is useless and does nothing, which is confusing

> - if you think of PRIMARY as the current selection, Cut doesn’t make any sense since the selection simultaneously disappears and becomes the current selection

The selection buffer is easier to understand if thought about more simply. Middle click to “put my selection here”.

The actual clipboard is a separate feature in my mind.

You and I both.

Yup, both have their uses. If you use a clipboard manager or have the clipboard synchronized between devices/remote desktops/VMs, the primary selection comes in handy for stuff you don't exactly want saved to disk, crossing VM boundaries, or transmitted over the network. I use middle-click pasting primarily for its separate buffer.

Shift+Insert has always been my preferred method of pasting into a terminal after too many mishaps with right-click or middle-click paste.

That problem has been solved by terminals whose readline awaits actual user input (actual enter from the keyboard) even when you paste a command with single line break or a multiline command. Most linux terminals do that nowadays, and it's also great for giving you a chance to review that oneliner you've copied from the browser, which could contain something different than what was shown.

It’s a right pain reverting that on modern desktops.

> GNOME dictates onto users what the developers think the users should use or have. I find that not acceptable.

Every operating system (or DE) does that. Hell, every piece of software does that. They're all just a bunch of opinions wrapped in a user interface.

Some may provide more opportunities to change the defaults, but those defaults still remain.

Yes, but the problem is the GNOME organization is headed by opinionated morons with zero clue how to design a user interface.

I rather like GNOME, which presumably also makes me a moron.

Or perhaps we're all just people with differing opinions on what constitutes a "good" user interface.

There are people who like Windows too. I also consider them morons.

They're probably referring to gnome's history of controversial opinions that many users don't like, such as:

- "simplifying the UI" by removing many useful features (like systray icons)

- "what makes you think sharpness is a metric?"

- claiming fractional scaling is dumb because "monitors don't have fractional pixels"

- "we know what users want" while ignoring most user feedback

- "we're not copying mac OS" while blatantly doing so

- "consistency is key" then changes entire UI paradigm every release

- "what's the usecase for <insert well-known feature>?"

- intentionally obscuring how to access / in the file picker

And in general just being incredibly tone-deaf and abusive to their own users on the forums. Torvalds has been calling out their "users are idiots and are confused by functionality" stance for over 20 years now.

This can be said about literally any software? And as GP points out, it's not "dictating what you can use or have" - you can turn it back on.

This is like, the least bad thing GNOME have ever done. Middle-click pasting makes no logical sense and only exists as a holdover from before copy-paste conventions were established. Nobody would design it this way today.

GNOME is doing something right for a change and fixing a common source of security issues.

If you like it, just keep the behavior enabled.

Never in my life have I heard of this security issue.

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