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Middle mouse click is so much more useful as the navigation tool that it is. Using it for something completely unrelated like pasting is degeneracy.
Actually, any text manipulation assigned to the mouse is completely ignoring the functionality of the 2 normal input devices on a normal computer.
You're missing the point, in Linux middle mouse button works for the navigation that you're mentioning, and additionally it pastes the text you have selected (not the one you have copied, so realistically you can "copy/paste" two things at once). So you don't lose anything, you just gain functionality.
You lose the auto-scroll button, which I use all the time and it only makes sense to be on the scroll wheel. I dispise what Linux does to this button. 🤷
What are you talking about? auto-scroll works the exact same way
You middle click in a web page and it gives you the scroll orb instead of pasting text in the selected text box? Last time I checked that was not default behaviour, but possible with configuration.
Yes, all you have to do is not click on a text input area. It's not the default behavior anywhere because the feature is disabled by default on most browsers (even on Windows) but enabling the auto-scroll feature on the browser makes it work exactly as you would expect, i.e. middle-click on a text area inputs the text, and on the majority of the page it gives you the scroll orb.
Auto-scroll by middle click is not disabled by default in windows and never was. Not in browsers, not I'm PDF apps, not in file explorers, not in word processors. If this were a disabled by default feature no one would use it. It's in linux that you have to muck about with configuration to get it back to normal, which is using a navigation button on your pointing device to work for navigation instead of text manipulation. You shouldn't have to configure something to make it make sense.
Ok, I was wrong, for some reason browsers have a different default for that setting depending on OS, for example Firefox docs:
https://kb.mozillazine.org/About:config_entries
In any case this is not a Linux problem, for some reason Mozilla (and probably Google as well) decided to use a different default depending on OS, so if you want the other behavior you need to change it, it has nothing to do with Linux, tomorrow Mozilla could decide to invert this setting, and it wouldn't be a Windows problem that the default is off.
Which is different from the middle-mouse paste which is a feature of X window manager, therefore one could make the argument that it is a Linux feature.
It's a Linux problem in the sense that like you say, the X window manager hijacked the middle mouse button for a different functionality way back in the day and the browser developers, and others as well, just respect that decision by default, even if it never made any sense. Many people are now used to it and prefer it like this so there was always resistance to changing it to how windows does it and just drop the whole mouse wheel does text manipulation thing.
If and until that changes to the sensible way, at least people like me have the configurations to fix it so I guess it could be worse.
There's no dropping the text manipulation thing, the setting on Firefox is completely under Firefox developers control, and has nothing to do with what the button does somewhere else. That's like saying it's a Windows problem that a shortcut is different by default on a given program, complain to Firefox devs if you think the default should be enabled.
Also you're making a huge deal out of something that's two clicks away, middle mouse button works as a navigation tool on Linux just like it does on Windows, additionally it provides extra features under some circumstances.
So to recap:
Honestly it's always the same, people claim Linux has a problem whenever a third party program does something. Linux is not perfect, but I have never seen anyone who doesn't use it actually list any of those problems, they always point at third party software as proof that Linux is bad.
Highlight text to auto-copy, middle-mouse to paste.
Smooth, fast and always accessible.
I'm sure there are newer ways to configure the mouse too.
Auto copy is a privacy concern and paste can be anything else but the middle mouse button, because it takes away the auto-scroll functionality which only makes sense to be on the wheel that deals with scrolling.