Hot take: good riddance.
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@vkc
I've used Linux since 1995. I use it personally for fun, and I've used it professionally for 30 years, incuding some of the largest computers on earth. And I've used middle-click for that entire time.I love using Gnome, *because* it doesn't overwhelm me with options. It gets out of the way. And I think removing middle-click is the right decision. The utility just isn't worth the confusion - two clipboards and accidental middle-clicks still confuse me.
@vkc
In general, being consistent, following standards and conforming to peoples expectations is more important than being optimal, in any sense.A great example is car control layout. The current two (or three) pedals and wheel layout can probably be improved. But not improved enough that it's worth disrupting the training and muscle memory of a billion people.
Basic desktop controls are the same. Being consistent across all desktops is better than being optimal.
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@vkc There is history.
What fuels the anger is the annoyance at the lack of reflection within Gnome of its role in the failure of desktop Linux.
Most notably it's insular design choices in Gnome 3, and the early shipment of that non-ready software, reducing Linux's share of the market from MacOS levels to a third of that.
Today, yet another insular design choice by Gnome. Of course people are going to give them stick. Even if it's a good decision.
@glent@aus.social @vkc@linuxmom.net
What fuels the anger is the annoyance at the lack of reflection within Gnome of its role in the failure of desktop Linux.
Dude, are you fucking serious? 4% and constantly growing is a failure?
It's some project made by volunteers in their free time, people who are still personally offended GNOME 2 era is gone are owed NOTHING.
Most notably it's insular design choices in Gnome 3, and the early shipment of that non-ready software, reducing Linux's share of the market from MacOS levels to a third of that.
What the fuck are you talking about? Serious question.
Today, yet another insular design choice by Gnome
Ah yes, because surely feature that is constant source of confusion to more people that can be counted is insulated from the user base. If we sticked to the desires of loud minorities, we would get nowhere.
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The way the article is written. The way the comments talk about it.
Why do people make it sound like GNOME is some sort of secret cabal of Linux haters?
It's a freaking desktop environment, they have every right to build it however they want, and you have every right to use something different. There's zero reason to get emotionally charged about it.
@vkc totally agree, i usually listen this type of hate from Linux desktop gatekeepers. Looks like a sect
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Hot take: good riddance. I dislike the middle click thing. Trips me up all the time as someone who accidentally clicks it when scrolling.
I think the right move is to make this (undoubtedly useful to some) behavior opt-in, not opt-out.
A lot of the gripes I see are just people being mad because GNOME makes choices they don't like. I don't understand why people write like this about GNOME, if you don't like it don't use it, your emotions make you look petty, etc etc.
https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/07/gnome_middle_click_paste/
@vkc Oh ffs no! Middle click under X has never meant "Paste". It has always meant "Insert the Primary Selection here". Any change to this will break my workflow. For those of you who, for youth or for newness, have no idea what I'm talking about, this is a good write up: https://www.jwz.org/doc/x-cut-and-paste.html
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Hot take: good riddance. I dislike the middle click thing. Trips me up all the time as someone who accidentally clicks it when scrolling.
I think the right move is to make this (undoubtedly useful to some) behavior opt-in, not opt-out.
A lot of the gripes I see are just people being mad because GNOME makes choices they don't like. I don't understand why people write like this about GNOME, if you don't like it don't use it, your emotions make you look petty, etc etc.
https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/07/gnome_middle_click_paste/
They really said "I implore the GNOME team to spend a day using Windows with just your keyboard, it's useful" about them removing a feature from the mouse on Linux?
I get that other tools can have some useful features, but... I don't see how that is relevant to the rest of the article at all?
I'm also not a fan of arguments from tradition in general. ddate was included in util-linux until 2012(ish, I've also seen 2011), despite not really belonging there.
Keeping it as an opt-in feature is what I think should happen, personally. I didn't even really look into disabling it, but I won't miss it -
Hot take: good riddance. I dislike the middle click thing. Trips me up all the time as someone who accidentally clicks it when scrolling.
I think the right move is to make this (undoubtedly useful to some) behavior opt-in, not opt-out.
A lot of the gripes I see are just people being mad because GNOME makes choices they don't like. I don't understand why people write like this about GNOME, if you don't like it don't use it, your emotions make you look petty, etc etc.
https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/07/gnome_middle_click_paste/
@vkc Recently I noticed that it has been disabled. It is frustrating that there is no setting for this behaviour because I always use it and it means I now have to do more clicks or a keyboard action to copy and paste in the terminal.
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@vkc thanks for illustrating my point.
@glent what?
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@vkc I agree about making it opt-in, but given the legacy they ought to show it in the settings app not in some config file. If you upgrade your OS and it doesn't work like it's always worked before, it's reasonable to expect you could look in the mouse settings next to cursor and scroll speed
@rappscal I tend to agree, put it in the settings app, *and* I'd argue that the best behavior would be to only disable it on fresh installs, not change it on an upgrade (I don't know how feasible that is, I'm not a GNOME dev).
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There is a vested interest by numerous groups within the free and open source community to take Linux in a direction that not everyone will agree with. GNOME happens to be one such group and tends to catch a lot of flak due to their unwillingness to compromise on their principles. Something that has at times caused complications in the projects they collaborate on such as Wayland.
Ultimately, we have a difference in opinion when it comes to communities and their responsibility. I believe that a community has a responsibility to tend to the needs and interests of the people from which it consists. As a YouTuber for example, you would be nothing without your audience and as such you may have a vested interest to appease them.
GNOME is held accountable only to the developers and people within their foundation and not the community. This creates a disconnect where people feel they are being ignored. When the users of your software make that discontent known and you continue to ignore it rather than address the issue, it festers resentment. That resentment builds up into the sentiment that some people have towards GNOME today.
Sure, they can always just use COSMIC which has some feature parity to GNOME. But that isn't the point. In order to maintain a healthy community, some concessions are necessary and the cause and effect of GNOME refusing to do so is the sentiment people hold towards them.
@vkc@linuxmom.net@Saorsa@neondystopia.world @vkc@linuxmom.net
GNOME is held accountable only to the developers and people within their foundation and not the community
GNOME is a project made out of volunteers, and helding volunteers "accountable" isn't ethical. If someone wants to take part if developing GNOME, or project in its proximity, there is guide https://welcome.gnome.org/ for people interested in contributing.
In fact, feedback is valuable, too. As long as it's respectful.
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@vkc Agreed. Although I wish wayland actually cared about accessibility
@draeand@the-gdn.net @vkc@linuxmom.net ehhhhhh…
https://tesk.page/2025/06/18/its-true-we-dont-care-about-accessibility-on-linux/
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@vkc
Like, give it a week and an extension to bring back middle click will be published, and harmony will be restored
@lxak@goblin.technology @vkc@linuxmom.net Why extension? There are other ways to do it
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Hot take: good riddance. I dislike the middle click thing. Trips me up all the time as someone who accidentally clicks it when scrolling.
I think the right move is to make this (undoubtedly useful to some) behavior opt-in, not opt-out.
A lot of the gripes I see are just people being mad because GNOME makes choices they don't like. I don't understand why people write like this about GNOME, if you don't like it don't use it, your emotions make you look petty, etc etc.
https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/07/gnome_middle_click_paste/
@vkc I love the middle click, I've been using it for about 26 years, and I think its one of my favourite features. I'll be annoyed if it goes away.
I'm totally ok with making it optional...
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@vkc not when you have muscle memory going back to the 1980s with middle click
not when the distro(s) you like have it as the default desktop
not when the other desktops are just a heap of no
Gnome tried to get rid of icons on the desktop a few years ago. User pressure brought them back (admittedly through some pretty foul shell hacks)
@scruss@xoxo.zone @vkc@linuxmom.net
Gnome tried to get rid of icons on the desktop a few years ago. User pressure brought them back (admittedly through some pretty foul shell hacks)
That happened with release of GNOME 3, in 2011 and GNOME never brought them back.
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There is a vested interest by numerous groups within the free and open source community to take Linux in a direction that not everyone will agree with. GNOME happens to be one such group and tends to catch a lot of flak due to their unwillingness to compromise on their principles. Something that has at times caused complications in the projects they collaborate on such as Wayland.
Ultimately, we have a difference in opinion when it comes to communities and their responsibility. I believe that a community has a responsibility to tend to the needs and interests of the people from which it consists. As a YouTuber for example, you would be nothing without your audience and as such you may have a vested interest to appease them.
GNOME is held accountable only to the developers and people within their foundation and not the community. This creates a disconnect where people feel they are being ignored. When the users of your software make that discontent known and you continue to ignore it rather than address the issue, it festers resentment. That resentment builds up into the sentiment that some people have towards GNOME today.
Sure, they can always just use COSMIC which has some feature parity to GNOME. But that isn't the point. In order to maintain a healthy community, some concessions are necessary and the cause and effect of GNOME refusing to do so is the sentiment people hold towards them.
@vkc@linuxmom.net@Saorsa @vkc it's wrong to assume that *everybody* agrees on most things, or even on most things. This was never the case, and it will never be, and it's ok, and the big advantage, is that besides having a lot of optionsm we have mostly Free Software the have the power to fork. Those who don't like this, don't Like Free Software.
It's ok for GNOME to do whatever GNOME wants to do, that's called freedom. I say this and I don't always agree with them, and I use GNOME since I use Linux (decades)
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The way the article is written. The way the comments talk about it.
Why do people make it sound like GNOME is some sort of secret cabal of Linux haters?
It's a freaking desktop environment, they have every right to build it however they want, and you have every right to use something different. There's zero reason to get emotionally charged about it.
@vkc they barely survived the malicious removal of init scripts by the Axis of Systemd, only to have their masculinity threatened by the Gnomerati making them toggle a setting in a DE they're not even using. It's a tough life /s
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In this period, in this timeline, at this moment, maybe, just maybe, we shouldn't talk about *desktop environment design disagreements* like they're causing deep emotional harm?
@vkc Ugh! I'm really sick of that 2010s Buzzfeed rage-bait article style.
If folks like the design choices Gnome makes, then great. Use Gnome!
If people don't like Gnome, then it's not like there isn't a range of mature alternatives out there like Cinnamon, MATE, and XFCE.
Heck, you can have a great desktop experience using the KDE apps and Plasma these days if you don't like Gnome's decisions.
And is Gnome's design choices really the worst thing going on in the world right now? Really?!
Like, is it even in the top 1000 worst things happening right now? -
@vkc Agreed. Although I wish wayland actually cared about accessibility
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The combination of "newlines in pasted text will trigger messages sending in some chat clients" and "the middle mouse button is millimeters away from the spacebar on some laptops" is awful behaviour. I have had mortifying accidents because of it, where multiline text automatically sent to people I was speaking with- because I have human motor skills and hit the middle mouse button by accident.
I admit it *can* be useful, I guess... but it's behaviour I would happily get rid of.
@mouseless @vkc I love the middle click, but I would be happy if people who don't could disable it.
I think mouse buttons being millimetre away from space bar is a bad computer design.
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@emi @vkc No, Wayland neeeds to care too, not just DEs. Right now, global keyboard access and other things which assistive technology would require is all over the place and DEs are allowed to do their own thing. Those kinds of features should be a part of the core Wayland specification. Accessibility should never be a third-class citizen. And the accessibility landscape is already fragmented enough. We don't need Wayland adding to it
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@lxak@goblin.technology @vkc@linuxmom.net Why extension? There are other ways to do it
@tragivictoria
I mean to agree with @vkc FOSS users don't need to overreact to dev decisions, because the community can change the software to their liking. Extensions are just a for-instance for how these changes are shared
