Comment by doodlesdev
3 days ago
> WHY the fuck would they disable it?
Because it's one of the most annoying and unintuitive things the GNOME desktop has for anyone that isn't a power user. Almost every single user I've shown GNOME to was surprised or bothered by this being the default instead of the usual scrolling you'd see in Windows.
I personally dislike this feature a lot, and it's very common for me to middle-click paste accidentally, even after years of using Fedora Linux as my one and only operating system across all of my machines. I've previously used a Firefox extension to override this default, but was bothered by the fact that other applications would still just middle-click paste.
Not everyone is a power user. Not everyone has the same workflow as you. Decisions like these have to be taken based on what the target audience for a desktop wishes. Arguably, GNOME is absolutely not for power users (just take a look at how similar it is to the macOS desktop environment to notice that).
> Almost every single user I've shown GNOME to was surprised or bothered by this being the default instead of the usual scrolling you'd see in Windows.
Would be good to see a well designed survey on this.
To me, middle click for pasting is not a power feature, but something I thought most Linux/UNIX users knew. It was one of the first things I learned on a UNIX DE.
Second, who cares what the Windows default behavior is? Why is GNOME changing a mainstay of UNIX to be more like Windows? For the last 15 years, I've used Linux and Windows both - very heavily. I've never used middle click for scrolling. Seems like an eye candy feature and not intended to be useful.
I'm on a MacOS right now, and middle clicking to scroll is absent.
Also, power users are the ones who will find and change the setting - that's pretty much what being a power user means. Picking defaults that work for novices makes sense, even if that's slightly more inconvenient for me.
I think this whole discussion is based on an assumption that changing the default is part of an agenda to get rid of middle-click-paste entirely. I don't think it is.
> Decisions like these have to be taken based on what the target audience for a desktop wishes.
Ok: can you show us the poll done by GNOME devs here? Please add the URL.
A poll done by GNOME devs will largely be answered by people who are power users. Knowing your target audience is harder than just polling your users or taking telemetry (in this case, because telemetry normally excludes power users, since they will disable it).
I think it's just clear that the proposal of the GNOME desktop is to be pretty democratic, both in types of devices it can run on and the variety of users. The project gets a lot of shit for many decisions it takes (some of which I also disagree with), but I think changing this default is absolutely justified.
> Almost every single user I've shown GNOME to was surprised or bothered by this being the default instead of the usual scrolling you'd see in Windows.
Middle click scrolls in Window?