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Middle-Click Paste? Not For Long
An anonymous reader writes "Select to copy and middle-click to paste. That's very convenient usability feature associated with UNIX graphical environments. But it is confusing for new users, so the ability to middle-click paste was briefly removed from GNOME 3.10. It was restored few days later, but with clear message: middle-click paste will be permanently removed from next GNOME version." I hope that "we'll defer this change until the next cycle" also means that it's getting re-thought, rather than just delayed.
Please, please, PLEASE make this an option, not a full removal.
I will stop using GNOME if this ability is fully removed.
Two questions:
1) How many "new users" did they actually talk to?
2) How many GNOME users are there, and of those users, how many are "new"?
It sounds to me like they're removing a feature that millions of people use, on a whim.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
The only result that this will have is either
1.) derivative products adding it back in or
2.) users moving to a different platform
Wake up idiots!!! Do you see how many forks of your project exist these days? That's because they have no other means to fix your broken products. Gnome is becoming un-recommendable as a desktop for all their idiotic design decisions. From now on, your options are KDE if you want a qt-based setup or Xfce/LXDE if you want gtk. Gnome no longer exists to me.
I have left slashdot and am now on Soylent News. FUCK YOU DICE.
Where the middle button shines, is when one need to copy and paste two pieces of junk from one window to another:
Select the first part, Ctrl-C, select the second part, then move on the target window and Ctrl-V to paste the first part and middle click to paste the second part.
There's no way one can easily do this without the middle button paste. Is there ?
(and desktop clipboard history isn't very ergonomic, last time I tried)
I must admit I don't use this feature very often, but I like it a lot when it comes handy.
I think the problem with Ubuntu is similar to the problem at M$. They feel that they have to make UI changes (they call them improvements) to show the end user it's not the same old thing.
I've really been wondering why a company doesn't just build something like litestep (basically a module loader and a large collection of modules) and continually beef each shell module's capability. Come up with a new layout each release to prove to people you're changing, while leaving old layouts around for people who liked them better.
Even the tech support guy not knowing how to tell you to do things over the phone would be no worse than it was with previous OS iterations "switch to '98 interface then click the gray bar" or they could now do the whole remote desktop thing.
Isn't this (middle clicks) at least partly because of Wayland? I thought that this middle click thing was X11-specific. You know, the PRIMARY versus CLIPBOARD selections etc. Does Wayland even have these notions (seeing as it doesn't pretend to be an operating system)?
Ezekiel 23:20
As a KDE user, I would prefer that to be true. Experience has shown me otherwise.
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
This is a very timely article for me. I installed Linux a week ago for a person with a junked copy of Windows Seven. To give you an idea of their technical expertise. They knew how to copy a URL from the address bar in a browser with right-click-copy and then go to a different tab, and right-click-paste to place the text in an email. So I get a call last night and she wanted to know how to do it in Linux. It had not even crossed her mind that a right-click might give her a context menu with the cut/copy/paste options. She is that computer illiterate. I mentioned ctrl-c ctrl-v, but she does not like the keyboard.
Then I remembered how much easier I find doing it the Unix way and why I hate getting stuck on Windows. Select then middles click is second nature to me. So I showed her how to do it. It took about 30 seconds to show her, and another minute or two to do it again and then let her do it. Funny thing is, she picked right up on it. It is NOT a confusing thing to a new Linux user. It is a useful feature and a good differentiator from Windows.
GNOME seems to want to remove any feature in Linux that makes Linux better than Windows.
vi +
MATE, personally. I've used XFCE4 in the past, but still has just a few too many rough edges for me.
Surprisingly, MATE did rather well in his tests, here. Better than XFCE4. Shame MATE still isn't ported to ARM.
http://l3net.wordpress.com/2013/03/17/a-memory-comparison-of-light-linux-desktops/
-- perl -e'print pack"H*","6e656d6f406d38792e6f7267"'