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Comment by shevy-java

10 hours ago

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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

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

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.