Hot take: good riddance.
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@vkc every time I interact with the GNOME developers the way I interact with normal parts of the open source community (i.e., come to collaborate, bearing patches and bug reports, seeking to improve the software), I am met with inexplicable rancor and disrespect. everyone knows GNOME for this pattern of user-hostility. that's why people are emotionally charged
@vkc part of this is that GNOME seems to hold the stance that users and developers will never be the same people. GNOME does not focus on empowering users to modify and improve their software. it's really at odds with the ethic that permeates most of the free software community, where you shouldn't have to be a developer to use a program, but users are encouraged to change and improve how their computer works for them
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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?
I'm old enough to remember this behavior dating back to at least CDE on traditional Unix systems like Solaris in the mid-90s, if not earlier. It was a great feature then.
BUT...
That was back when mice looked like this! They had a literal middle mouse button. This design predated the scroll wheel, which was added much later, and merged in as an extremely awkward and unreliable middle mouse button in some cases. The old behaviors make no sense anymore, at least not as default behaviors for most users with modern mice.
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@vkc Oh…my…gosh. I've never liked GNOME (or KDE). But so 🤬 what? My spouse, who is not a programmer, has enjoyed every version of GNOME since 1999 & a Linux-based system has been her primary desktop for decades.
I'm vaguely aware that *yet again*; like some kind of clockwork, the world wants to
-post about #GNOME for the 2ⁿ-th time.I gave this #GUADEC keynote 10 years ago directed at these haters; I'm sad it's still relevant,though.
https://sfconservancy.org/videos/2016-08-12_Bradley-Kuhn_GUADEC-2016_Keynote.webm
@bkuhn @vkc @federicomena @ebassi @karen Funny I just posted almost exactly the same thing a few hours ago.
These people are crazy and should really get a life
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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'm one of the weird people who actually liked Gnome Shell when it first was released, and I still use it now. I also cut my baby Unix teeth using SunOS on Sparc stations in the early/mid 90's with X11, landing on fvwm as my wm of choice (I still miss middle click root context menus). I love middle click paste and I suspect that if it does get removed from Gnome core, somebody will build an extension to add it back. It's the beauty and curse of F/OSS: a myriad of options.
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Anyway, if you like GNOME and their design concepts, you're awesome and totally a valid user of Linux.
Sick of the absurd nonsense that says otherwise.
@vkc I'm not a fan of GNOME because it doesn't work for me but for some it does. Whats great about Linux is the choice. I love using DWM but many don't. Thats fine.
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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 well I use it quite much, often to copy 2 things at once, like both URL and text to avoid another round trip to another window.
But then I use KDE, so…
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Anyway, if you like GNOME and their design concepts, you're awesome and totally a valid user of Linux.
Sick of the absurd nonsense that says otherwise.
@vkc I'm a heavy user of "middle click to paste" so I'd definitely be annoyed if it were removed. Having it opt-in is something I can live with.
I was similarly annoyed when "start typing to jump to a file in Nautilus" was removed and have in fact installed a patched version in some machines to add it back.
That said, I'm a big fan of GNOME's focus on design in general and I think it's great that they're revisiting what an interface *can* be like rather than just following along with old ideas
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@vkc I'm a heavy user of "middle click to paste" so I'd definitely be annoyed if it were removed. Having it opt-in is something I can live with.
I was similarly annoyed when "start typing to jump to a file in Nautilus" was removed and have in fact installed a patched version in some machines to add it back.
That said, I'm a big fan of GNOME's focus on design in general and I think it's great that they're revisiting what an interface *can* be like rather than just following along with old ideas
@vkc probably getting too close to the year now, but I normally recommend GNOME to people who want a "what did desktop and mobile computing look like in 2030" experience
I've also been surprised to see GNOME features pop up in places like Android and Windows from time to time. Of course, since I use GNOME much more it doesn't necessarily mean the other people copied all of them; maybe they had some of them before but I just noticed it in GNOME first. Either way, the ideas are all very neat
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@vkc probably getting too close to the year now, but I normally recommend GNOME to people who want a "what did desktop and mobile computing look like in 2030" experience
I've also been surprised to see GNOME features pop up in places like Android and Windows from time to time. Of course, since I use GNOME much more it doesn't necessarily mean the other people copied all of them; maybe they had some of them before but I just noticed it in GNOME first. Either way, the ideas are all very neat
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Yeah, some of those reactions are over the top. But middle click paste really is a great feature. If Gnome does away with it, I hope somebody adds it back via an extension, and fast.
With any luck, the Gnome devs will read the room for once and abandon that idea.
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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 GNOME does have a fairly long history of being the tail that wags the dog; a lot of the freedesktop.org stuff that made desktop environments objectively worse in measurable ways ... came from GNOME, and was rammed through because it had the funding and distro backing. For example, it used to be that if you asked for a 12 pt font, you got a font that was actually 12/72 of an inch baseline spacing on your actual monitor ... but now you don't, and that's absolutely on GNOME.
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@vkc GNOME does have a fairly long history of being the tail that wags the dog; a lot of the freedesktop.org stuff that made desktop environments objectively worse in measurable ways ... came from GNOME, and was rammed through because it had the funding and distro backing. For example, it used to be that if you asked for a 12 pt font, you got a font that was actually 12/72 of an inch baseline spacing on your actual monitor ... but now you don't, and that's absolutely on GNOME.
@vkc It may not be well articulated, but in at least some cases I think the upset is not with the fact that GNOME might be doing something different, but what kinds of effects that will have on the rest of the ecosystem.
I'm not sure GNOME has the kind of hegemony that it had for a while there in the mid-to-late 2000s, so maybe this isn't practically as much of an issue any more, but I think it does make a lot of people (myself included) shy when GNOME does (subjectively) objectionable things.
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Anyway, if you like GNOME and their design concepts, you're awesome and totally a valid user of Linux.
Sick of the absurd nonsense that says otherwise.
@vkc I really question a number of GNOME design decisions but I still donate to them every month: we need Linux desktop environments that fit everyone's needs. I don't know why other people can't see it that way.
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@vkc I really question a number of GNOME design decisions but I still donate to them every month: we need Linux desktop environments that fit everyone's needs. I don't know why other people can't see it that way.
@wwahammy@social.treehouse.systems @vkc@linuxmom.net
Maybe they should actually design for desktops and laptops instead of phones then? -
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 there's probably a need for a fork of Gtk. Reading "Gnome will make this opt in" feels like "this will become deprecated and then disappear entirely for people who aren't even using Gnome".
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@peterrenshaw @aj If Gnome works for you, that's great, but I suspect you're ascribing it functionality that is Linux specific or unrelated to gnome.
The move from CRT monitors to TFT, and EDID existing on everything helped a lot. xf86, and xorg, became largely self configuring.
Unfortunately I have to let you know that if you're running modern xorg *right now* on a CRT (even one with proper EDID) it may still be necessary to manually configure configurations. If you're using multiple GPUs, gnome will not help, because it runs after X starts. I know this because FreeBSD is merrily telling me 'you have to manually specify the GPU' today.
Wayland is 'better' if by 'better' you define 'it starts without configuration', but not if 'it delivers all functionality that could be reasonably expected regardless of the compositor in use'.
Although X configuration files were and are, agreed, A Pain they worked *everywhere*. As opposed to multiple options for compositors, which may not work at all!
@syllopsium @peterrenshaw @aj It's been really interesting to see all these different experiences.
Personally, I switched to GNOME 3 in 2016 after using other DEs since 1999; I've written a lot of XConfigs and calculated modelines by hand. I didn't love GNOME, but it worked well and I felt that it was the most polished experience available.
When Wayland became available, I eagerly adopted it. Where my HiDPI displays were basically a slideshow under X11, they were smooth as butter under GNOME and Wayland, and all my various docks and monitors were more or less plug-and-play.
There were rough edges (figuratively, the main problem was actually blurry X11 apps, LOL), but I've been watching them go away with each release as Wayland features and awareness percolate into toolkits and apps.
So like, I guess I just wanted to be the voice with a different experience. I switched to Wayland in 2018 and never looked back, and I really like GNOME now. I miss my wacky themes. I still occasionally encounter mild annoyances. I still have a few apps that need a little prodding with environment variables or runtime options to look right,. But overall, I'm a happy camper flinging pretty and crisp windows around between screens with different DPIs, and I'm quite comfy in my mostly-GTK+ world.
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@bruce Agreed. Once you get used to it, middle-click paste is hard to shake. I still try to do it on Windows work PCs and look confused when it doesn't work.
Trouble is, I don't think gtk apps have done it properly for years. I think the semantics are supposed to be that if you click on somewhere with a caret, it leaves the primary selection intact. So you can highlight some text, reposition the cursor, then middle click to paste. Gnome apps seem to clear the selection when you do this.
@vkc@kbm0 @bruce @vkc Now that rings a bell, it's been ages! Think X has multiple selections, and it may have been that when you lost focus your primary selection became the secondary selection? Vim changes the selection highlight under that circumstance (but it changes back again on refocus, so maybe not).
Fun fact, early Vim only had selection ("*) support, not clipboard, and it was I that got the PoC working for clipboard support, which Bram then adapted and added as "+.
I am old.
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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 This theory is only half baked but I think there’s something around user-centric design and misogyny; that a thoughtfully organized, aesthetically appealing environment (e.g. whining about there’s too much white space in GTK4/Adwaita apps) that takes away needless complexity and endless configuration choices is inherently inferior, pussified. The article takes a very “back in my day” tone that’s on the same continuum: the old way is the right way cos I’m scared of new things and young people and progress.
It’s all so exhausting. Just use i3 on Arch ffs
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Anyway, if you like GNOME and their design concepts, you're awesome and totally a valid user of Linux.
Sick of the absurd nonsense that says otherwise.
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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/
that's why sometimes i have the copied text randomly pasted when i scroll around! i never figured it out in 15 years of using Linux. i thought it's just a weird bug.
