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Comment by dalai | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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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