Mastodawn

udo m. rader ☕ 🇪🇺 🇺🇦 🐧Jan 11

haven't seen much about this in the usual news, so an official WTH: Both #Gnome and #Firefox are about to simply delete middle-mouse-button paste because

"This is an X11ism, originally an xsetting 1 which frequently results is in unexpected behavior when people pressing the middle mouse button."

So extremely (and I mean EXTREMELY!) useful features that have been around for decades get dropped because some people accidentally pressed the middle mouse button ...

https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/07/gnome_middle_click_paste/

GNOME dev gives fans of Linux's middle-click paste the middle finger

Opinion: Proposal targets long-standing behavior as 'an X11ism'

The Register

@riaschissl They reimplemented it for their Wayland session and implemented an option to disable it. Like you could with X. But because one guy with a personal vendetta against X wrote a report to change the option default, that got zero traction, we all have to read posts like yours. This is exactly why OSS is always full of drama.