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.
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.
It is not just GNOME devs. Try to interact with systemd-poettering or I-pwn-glibc-Drepper. For some reason the Red Hat centric guys are troublemakers.
More recently KDE devs also became troublemakers - first David "all must use systemd", then nate "I-can-ask-for-donations-at-will-by-placing-a-trojan-daemon-onto-people-whose-sole-job-is-to-ask-for-donations" (more about this guy here: https://jriddell.org/2025/09/14/adios-chicos-25-years-of-kde...) and of course the "there are no xorg-server users left on KDE, so all must use wayland". Developers became a LOT more like dictators in the last 10 years specifically. This was a change indeed. I am not sure what happened, but things changed. GTK is now also a pure GNOMEY dev-kit. Good luck trying to convince the GTK devs of anything that used to be possible in gtk2 or gtk3 - it is now GNOME only.
I'm pretty scared what userland piece of software will be re-written while ditching backwards compatibility and making the current body of support knowledge worthless. After all, we've replaced the display server (sort of), audio, init and service management, network commands (netplan) if not much more.
My bet would be on a rewrite of CUPS in Rust. Oh, your printer that worked for 20 years is now a useless brick? What a shame, at least now the printing subsystem is secure and blazing fast.
*turn it from default-on to default-off
It's still a change. GNOME dictates onto users what the developers think the users should use or have. I find that not acceptable.
> 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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defaults matter a lot!
Developers change defaults all the time and make things far worse.
Vim 9.0 default changes required a 6 line vimrc to undo the damage.
GNOME devs really are special. I wonder why.
It is not just GNOME devs. Try to interact with systemd-poettering or I-pwn-glibc-Drepper. For some reason the Red Hat centric guys are troublemakers.
More recently KDE devs also became troublemakers - first David "all must use systemd", then nate "I-can-ask-for-donations-at-will-by-placing-a-trojan-daemon-onto-people-whose-sole-job-is-to-ask-for-donations" (more about this guy here: https://jriddell.org/2025/09/14/adios-chicos-25-years-of-kde...) and of course the "there are no xorg-server users left on KDE, so all must use wayland". Developers became a LOT more like dictators in the last 10 years specifically. This was a change indeed. I am not sure what happened, but things changed. GTK is now also a pure GNOMEY dev-kit. Good luck trying to convince the GTK devs of anything that used to be possible in gtk2 or gtk3 - it is now GNOME only.
https://pointieststick.com/2025/03/10/personal-and-professio... for the sake of completeness here's Nate Graham version of events.
I'm pretty scared what userland piece of software will be re-written while ditching backwards compatibility and making the current body of support knowledge worthless. After all, we've replaced the display server (sort of), audio, init and service management, network commands (netplan) if not much more.
My bet would be on a rewrite of CUPS in Rust. Oh, your printer that worked for 20 years is now a useless brick? What a shame, at least now the printing subsystem is secure and blazing fast.
3 replies →