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.
theregister.com/2026/01/07/gno…
GNOME dev gives fans of Linux's middle-click paste the middle finger
Opinion: Proposal targets long-standing behavior as 'an X11ism'Liam Proven (The Register)

Federico Mena Quintero
in reply to Veronica Explains • • •Middle-click paste is one of those "weird Unix" interaction things that really requires other "weird Unix" things to work well, namely focus-follows-mouse and the concept of an X11-like selection mechanism.
It broke when scrollwheels took over the middle button.
It broke when you slipped while bringing a window to the front, thus causing a selection in *that* other window, and thus losing the selection from the first one that you intended to middle-paste.
I loved it in 1996; not anymore.
Veronica Explains
in reply to Veronica Explains • • •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.
Veronica Explains
in reply to Veronica Explains • • •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.
Nix Inch Nails🐀
in reply to Veronica Explains • • •This is unfortunately expected from Liam Proven, same guy who gave us an "amazing" article lying that KDE/GNOME/Wayland developers, as a whole, do not care about accessibility, whos whole output to the Linux community has been shitty ignorant article after shitty ignorant article
He is, in the nicest way possible, a hack writer and one of those "anti-DEI" assholes, But what do I know, im just one of those evil GNOME devs making linux evil and woke for my own profit
TheEvilSkeleton 🇮🇳 🏳️⚧️
in reply to Nix Inch Nails🐀 • • •@zoeyTheWitch don't forget about the blatant ageism
> As we have said before, we suspect this disconnect between younger, keener developers who don't know or care about late 20th century user interface standards or accessibility concerns, but who strongly want to junk what they perceive as legacy baggage, are behind the moves to deprecate and remove X11
theregister.com/2025/06/10/xli…
@vkc
Forked-off Xlibre tells Wayland display protocol to DEI in a fire
Liam Proven (The Register)