Dumb devs
Recently, common features which used to work seemlessly in all linux environments are being removed, and usual behavior is changed.
Why ?
My main concerns are copy text from simple mouse selection, and paste from a simple middle click, or start search with a simple "/" stroke, or window drag from anywhere when Alt is pressed.
All these used to work with all the distributions or applications I've tried for almost two decades.
But recently, this behavior is removed from many parts of applications like Firefox, thunderbird, or libreoffice.
It even becomes impossible to select some text which used to be selectable from a "simple" "double-click" (sender or recipient addresses in thunderbird for example). You now have to right clic on it, select "copy" ... and paste in some other stupid graphical app which will support paste from right-click menu (even Ctrl-V does not paste, it seems to be stored in some specific clipboard buffer).
Is it because this behavior is too complicated to implement ? Maybe the older developers were genious guys (which is certainly true), but supposedly recent tools, languages, and frameworks are more performant, so we should get more functionnalities, not less !!!!
Have the developers gone dumb ? Or do they consider that the users are dumb ?
Or maybe is this done to mimic other systems, in a huge (and, from my point of view, stupid) monoculture movement ?
GNU/*/Linux systems ARE different from other systems. Trying to make them stupid clones of other systems will not create a greater membership, it will make them useless. Current users will stop contributing to software projects they cannot use (I think that software developpement is not only the work of a few core devs, but the sum of many contributions, including testing made by simple users) and the system will finally loose it's main source of users, it's pool of future devs, and fall into disuse.
I feel sad about this trend that has been going on for a few years now.
I really hope that devs will understand that this is a real problem, which will lead to less users, and less new devs, and thus lead to the death of these wonderfull alternatives we (still) have.