Comment by angersock | Hacker News Reader

Comment by angersock | Hacker News Reader

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More details here:

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=665193

Sometwhat telling:

  (In reply to comment #2)
  > Breaking a default that has been in X forever is not   
  desirable. In this case,
  > it is a good default. Leave it alone. Bastien, please   
  do not do this.


  Disabling broken behaviour by default is a good thing. It 
  would be a GTK+ specific XSetting, which would only be 
  disabled by default based on your XSettings manager. If 
  you use gnome-settings-daemon, then it would be disabled 
  by default.

  The people that paste their passwords to IRC will thank us.

Literally everyone in the bug thread is like "Please, don't do this/why would you do this?" and Bastien is like "nope nope better for the users hush".

What a bunch of tools.

A reply by a Gnome dev to an older bug (536271) about this is even more telling:

    I would even go as far as to disable middle mouse 
    paste without exposing any GUI option for this [...] 
    A hardcore unix person will shout and scream if we 
    try to remove it, yet it is flawed. We should remove 
    it and use a one, predictable way of copy & pasting.

c.f Jef Raskin's idea of the 'monotonous' interface, i.e. an interface in which common actions could be performed in one way only, and that one way could be predicted from context reliably. He thought that the result would be an interface that is easy to learn quickly.

And that raises the old issue of 'experts' with the interface wanting more control.

I actually like Gnome Shell, but I can see how a decision making process that depends on what one developer thinks is good for users may have problems in the longer term...

The devs seem like they're on some sort of holy war to purify the gui. The problem is that interface design (like anything else) is about trade-offs. GNOME needs some folks that have been through this cycle and understand it.

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