It’s a generic feature of X available in all desktop environments (essentially there’s two copy-paste mechanism which you can use independently). Much easier to use than manual C-c C-v, especially if you have a third mouse button also on your laptop.

And this is the problem. There is zero thought being given to different usage scenarios, and when it is, it's a chaotic solution that works some of the time. How do you middle-click-paste if you are on a trackpad with only two buttons, for example?

I'm only picking on this to illustrate the point: things are hacked together at almost every level for a workstation. This is why "The Year of the Linux Desktop" never happened.

In stark contrast, I am much, much happier with Linux as a server machine than as a workstation, and prefer it to any others.

I know for sure that in CDE with SunOS and HP-UX middle click was for paste. I think also on SGI with Irix, but that is going back to 1994 when I was a young teen so I don't remember exactly. Middle click to paste also worked on some linuxes, which is why it was important to get a 3 button mouse even though the middle button did nothing on windows. I want to say that "middle click to paste" is and old unix convention, but I only have the 2.5 examples.

Middle click to paste is indeed an old convention. Xterm supports it, so I suspect it goes all the way back to the early days of the X Window System, c. 1984.

I don't have a problem with middle click being a backwards-compatible convention. It's that the option to change it is non-obvious, and therefore excludes laptop users.

As a counter-example: Much earlier versions of Windows had a menu in the top left corner. The shortcut to close a window used to be double-clicking in that corner. In Windows 7 (not sure about 8 or 10), that menu button/icon is gone. Of course, you can close a windows with the X in the right corner, but the old shortcut still works even though there is seemingly nothing there.

I can't remember where I read this, but I always think of it when it comes to UX design:

Always have more than one way to do the same thing in a UI. Users will pick whichever works better for their worklow.

I wasn't defending it. I'm familiar with it and use it occasionally, but I don't think I would have made that design choice.

hmm, horses for courses. I thought popular thinking had moved on from the perl philosophy of "there's more than one way to do it" to "let's reduce complexity and errors by just having one way to do it". While having a CLI and GUI might be good for two different UIs what's the point of having two ways to do the same thing?

The windows X is more of a backwards compatibility thing I imagine, because it makes no sense to have an invisible menu in the top left corner.

There are two ways of doing copy/paste. The middle clicking and Ctrl+C/V.

>How do you middle-click-paste if you are on a trackpad with only two buttons, for example?

Tap twice and drag on the second tap to select.

Tap with three fingers to paste.

Don't use the buttons.

Why on earth is there not a way to turn this off? I could be a bit understanding if there was just no UI option for this and I had to make an edit to an X conf file, but it's baffling that there just doesn't seem to be a way at all to turn it off. Some applications like Firefox let you change middle-click to autoscroll but that doesn't help outside of Firefox. I'm so worried I'm going to highlight my password and then absent-mindedly middle click and paste it into a chat twenty minutes later!

You can turn it of in gnome-tweak-tool