this post was submitted on 05 Jan 2026
170 points (95.7% liked)
Linux
61673 readers
622 users here now
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
- No misinformation
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
As someone who likes the middle-click to do mouse relative scrolling, I would be OK with this being configurable on a per-application level.
I don't think it really makes sense as a "standard". Blender will never use middle click as paste, for example.
Middle click to paste the X PRIMARY selection predates Blender.
Yes, I do know how old Blender is.
Right,
But just because it was a standard doesn't mean it made sense as a standard. So when 99% of applications don't care to adopt the standard, it really only makes sense to let the application space decide what to do with middle click and to fall back on the user's system configuration if it's unspecified (which can still be paste if you want it to be imo)
If 99% of applications that run on *nix desktops didn't want to accept middle-click to paste text where that's an operation that makes sense, I would agree with you. I do not believe that to be the case.
On the one hand, I'm all for having it configurable per app. But there should also be a global default, so that one doesn't need to set it for each program. The current proposal sounds as if I would need to activate it once in the compositor (Gnome) and then separately in Firefox. It should probably be centrally handled by the compositor (not sure if this is possible, don't know how primary selection works on Wayland).