Not mentioned in the OP is that both discussions include a setting to enable middle mouse button paste for those who want it; it will just be off by default. Everyone calm down.
this post was submitted on 05 Jan 2026
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TBH, I’ve seen this cause more confusion in people than being considered helpful. Ctrl+V/Cmd+V are universally understood and behave predictably. Middle mouse click not so much. (Did you know there are two clipboards on Linux and MMB only pastes from one of them?)
I actually did not know there are two clipboards. Why/how do they work?
They're called "selections", the main ones being PRIMARY and CLIPBOARD, and it's effectively a form of IPC mediated by X. When you select something, that goes into the PRIMARY selection, while when you copy something, it goes into both PRIMARY and CLIPBOARD.
The problem is that "middle mouse click" isn't actually paste, it's "insert primary selection". As long as they're in sync you won't notice any issue (Ctrl+V and MMB will both insert the same content), as soon as they're out of sync you're suddenly exposed to an implementation detail of the X11 protocol.
And it's easy to go out of sync, simply copy something and then select unrelated text, now Ctrl+V and MMB will output different things. It can be useful, e.g. if you're having to copy a bunch of different pieces of text from one window to another, you can simply select and MMB, no keyboard needed, but it's not intuitive IMO, and conflicts with modern usage of the middle mouse button (Get it wrong when trying to open a link in a new tab and you'll dump whatever text you last selected into the site instantly)
Also, these selections aren't a thing under Wayland, it's been re-implemented as a normal paste operation there. The question is actually whether the middle mouse button should be treated like any other mouse button or have this special behaviour by default. My vote is to expose it via the mouse settings applet and leave it up to users, like any other special mouse button.
You select the text and it magically is in this second (or actually first) clipboard. I have a habit of selecting the text I’m reading, so this selection is always something, and sometimes contains sensitive data. There were countless of situations when I was composing a long message, scrolling it and accidentally, not even noticing (it’s long already), pasted the contents. I hate this ‘feature’ and in general don’t understand who wants it and why. Disabling it would be a huge improvement for everyone, as those who need it usually know they need it, so there’s no difficulty in enabling it back.
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This article is dogshit. Its clearly written to make it sound like theyre completely getting rid of it to get people pissed off at GNOME and Mozilla. The GNOME merge request has "by default" in the title, so its pretty damn obvious they're not getting rid of it completely.
As I explained elsewhere there is no official app to change this setting. Users can hack their gsettings.
Support for middle-paste will slowly but surely bitrot and eventually be removed.
They explicitly mention the plan to add a toggle in gnome settings in the merge request.
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What's with all the complaints here?
New users expect middle click to bring up an auto-scroll widget instead of pasting by default.
You can set up your computer how ever you want.
Want auto-scroll? Set it to auto-scroll.
Want paste? Set it to paste.
The first thing you do on a new system is set up the computer how you want.
No one's taking anything away from you.
agreed. and middle click being paste has to be one of the stupidest defaults. I understand people use it, and whatever, everyone has their own workflow, but now middle click to drag doesn't work and you've confused everyone since now it's different everywhere.
Okay. I could spend hours and hours criticising GNOME for a lot of things, but this is not one of them. It is not removing functionality, as the article implies; as others here highlighted, it's simply changing a default. That's completely fine.
No default gnome app will be able to toggle that default. You can hack it in gsettings.
And worse, the fact there is a setting means that only the default will be tested. The feature will slowly but surely bitrot. In a few years we'll see a proposal to remove it entirely. This is how software development works.
I understand how useful it is to quickly paste selected text, and have used it frequently, but I finally had enough of it after the thousandth time accidentally pasting private information or random garbage into a new tab search, discord chats, or the middle of my code without realizing it..
I think their proposal to make it a toggle that is off by default is the best solution. A lot more people are adopting Linux now and this will be one less point of friction for the new user experience coming from Windows, thus making it more likely they'll stick with the OS, and old users who are setting up a fresh install will just switch it back to the previous behavior as they configure their system, and never think about it again.
So anyway, not long ago I went searching for a way to disable it system-wide (since KDE on X11 doesn't offer any toggle for it, at least for me) and the best solution I found is this little program that clears the middle-click selection clipboard any time you middle click so you never paste anything. Works like a charm for me.
https://github.com/milaq/XMousePasteBlock
I think the open in new tab behavior/ do the scroll thing makes more sense for the middle click.
Wait.. middle mouse button pastes? I've been using Linux for two years and that is news to me. To be honest, that sounds like more trouble than it's worth to be on by default. Maybe just make it an option.
I find it very useful, and it conflicts with normal copy paste very rarely. There are two clipboards, one is filled with latest highlighted, and the other with latest Ctrl+C:ed. Middle click pastes from the first, Ctrl+V from the second. This makes you able to copy two things at once: ctrl+c something first, highlight something else second, paste in any order. The confusing thing when learing to use it for me was that since I need to highlight to ctrl+c, I will overwrite what is in the middle click clipboard, and it also means you cannot highlight something to replace it with whats in your middle click clipboard. It does however mean that most times you want to do a ctrl+c/ctrl+v both clipboards are in sync. Not sure why, but I often find myself having to copy/paste two things at once, and I use both buffers without thinking. Which makes it impossible to use macos.
Depends on the distribution and the defaults, but yeah it's decently common for middle click to paste. I'd no idea Mozilla doesn't respect the OS setting for this though, because I can't recall ever turning it off in any of the browsers I use, but that could be because the forks are more sensible than Firefox itself.
In GNOME you have to modify a gsetting, or use something like GNOME Tweaks to disable it. Which is ridiculous, it should really just be under Accessibility > Pointing And Clicking
I think GNOME is trying hard to overturn the idea that Linux has a rather bad layman user-experience, and part of that is the assumption that a layman doesn't want too many options because it gets confusing. As a UI/UX person I definitely get this, but as I always argue with the head UX guy at my workplace, we're not necessarily dealing just with laymen, but people who use our software as everyday tools and they'll want the options to customise things to their liking.
Some extra toggles won't change that. Hell you can hide it behind an "advanced mode" toggle even. Google does that with their idiotic "tap build number umpteen times to enable developer tools."
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Mozilla and Gnome
What the fuck guys. Are you for real?
This is what you spend your time on?
Gnome also spends time making posts bashing on developers who create alternative DEs, and mozilla also spends time thinking about how to put more ai in firefox
System76 spent their time spreading slander about Gnome and being shitty to upstream, just FYI
The fact that you are downvoted only shows that the slander sadly works.
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Can I just say what the fuck?
Was just talking to another Linux user about a week or so ago about how useful the middle click paste is. I'll be pissed if I ever do a new install and have to figure out how to make the thing work the way it always has in the past.
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Whats next, removing Ctrl+Insert/Shift+Delete/Shift+Insert as its confusing that we have two different ways to use the clipboard?
Gnome is all about ~~limiting~~ streamlining the experience!
It's a travesty it's a solely X11 thing and that it wasn't adopted by other operating systems. Back in the day when I was doing a back office job one of the main apps ran on Solaris via what looked like some weird X11 to Windows forwarding app. Clipboard was shared between host and remote app so it was very obvious to see how much of a productivity gain middle-click paste was. Regretfully that's the only app they managed to retire since I left. Mainframe one is still going strong.
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Yes, let's keep taking features away. 🙄
This is actually an accessibility issue. It's often much easier for me to use middle click paste than other copy and paste methods. But as always those numbnuts just think about streamlining everything.
There should be real hotkey editing in the settings or it should respect the OS hotkey settings. As of now the only way to toggle this is by diving into about config and finding the flag.
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