197
GNOME and Mozilla Discuss Proposal to Disable Middle Mouse Paste on Linux (linuxiac.com)
submitted 8 months ago by to c/linux@lemmy.ml
106 comments fedilink hide all child comments
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 18 points 8 months ago (4 children)

The essence of the article:

The discussions, visible in Mozilla’s Phabricator revision D277804 and a linked GNOME gsettings-desktop-schemas merge request, focus on disabling the traditional primary selection paste by default.

Mozilla proposes changing the default behavior of the Firefox browser on Unix builds so that pressing the middle mouse button no longer pastes text by default.

The functionality will be there and can be enabled. The reasoning:

The author of the revision frames the current behavior as a source of confusion and accidental pastes, especially when users press the middle button without expecting the clipboard contents to be inserted into text fields.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • hideshow 8 child comments
    •
  • [–] 4 points 8 months ago

    To have it as ab option, great. I believe KDE already has this? Computers should work the way the user wants it, so a middle click should do what the user wants it to do.

    Removing it completely would be insanity

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    But why? Then the users thinks "huh, weird" and goes on.

    I've seen that countless times with people that are less technical.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 4 child comments
    •
  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago (1 child)

    It's very easy for a user to accidentally paste private or sensitive information somewhere dangerous if theyre unaware of this feature.

    The FreeDesktop specification refers to this feature as an "easter egg", and something like this should absolutely not be an easter egg.

    This change would mean disabling it by default and adding a settings entry that actually explains it, making sure users are informed before they can accidentally use it.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 0 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    Then that could be solved by displaying a message the first time GNOME is launched, not by disabling it. This will just break workflows for quite a lot of people.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago* (1 child)

    It will break their workflow for a few seconds before they change the setting back. Or they could read the changes before installing a major update and change it before even doing anything.

    Maybe in the future it will be added to the initial setup guide along with stuff like choosing if you want mouse acceleration, but I really dont think its that big a deal.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago (1 child)

    "read the changes before installing a major update"

    As if people have the time to read the changelogs for every single package all the time... 🙄

    This is pretty important on a server to avoid disruptions and outages, but people have other things to do.

    And once it is no longer on and has become a setting, they can just remove the setting and force people to drop gsettings and then remove it completely.

    They could also instead ask people on first launch. Some people enable telemetry, so they will find out how many people prefer to keep it, which I bet will be most.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago

    "read the changes before installing a major update"

    Obviously I dont think people need to read every change log for every piece of software. I do think its a good idea to read the release notes for a major update of your DE thought, since its the piece of software that is going to effect you the most.

    And once it is no longer on and has become a setting, they can just remove the setting and force people to drop gsettings and then remove it completely.

    What reason do they possibly have to do this? The setting already exists and is feature complete. It doesnt require maintenance. They also noted in the merge request that many RHEL users use it, so RedHat has a financial incentive not to remove it.

    They could also instead ask people on first launch. Some people enable telemetry, so they will find out how many people prefer to keep it, which I bet will be most.

    They could also just make it a setting. I really dont think it makes a big difference. They can also still use telemetry to see how many users enable it. Based on this thread, I really doubt it will be most.

    The first time startup wizard should be kept relatively short and minimal. This just seems like a very unnecessary thing to include.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent