It’s what I use right now and it’s great in many aspects but I do still miss the graceful transition between languages that swiftkey was offering. With this I need to switch manually every time. With swiftkey I could write directly in any language and change in the same sentence and it could deal with it.
It’s a Linux problem in the sense that like you say, the X window manager hijacked the middle mouse button for a different functionality way back in the day and the browser developers, and others as well, just respect that decision by default, even if it never made any sense. Many people are now used to it and prefer it like this so there was always resistance to changing it to how windows does it and just drop the whole mouse wheel does text manipulation thing.
If and until that changes to the sensible way, at least people like me have the configurations to fix it so I guess it could be worse.
Auto-scroll by middle click is not disabled by default in windows and never was. Not in browsers, not I’m PDF apps, not in file explorers, not in word processors. If this were a disabled by default feature no one would use it. It’s in linux that you have to muck about with configuration to get it back to normal, which is using a navigation button on your pointing device to work for navigation instead of text manipulation. You shouldn’t have to configure something to make it make sense.
You middle click in a web page and it gives you the scroll orb instead of pasting text in the selected text box? Last time I checked that was not default behaviour, but possible with configuration.
Auto copy is a privacy concern and paste can be anything else but the middle mouse button, because it takes away the auto-scroll functionality which only makes sense to be on the wheel that deals with scrolling.
You lose the auto-scroll button, which I use all the time and it only makes sense to be on the scroll wheel. I dispise what Linux does to this button. 🤷
When you want to select a section in a long document or webpage without dragging the mouse and waiting for animations you hold click from where you want the start point to be and page up/down.
When you are trying to select multiple icons from a file browser using your keyboard, shift + arrows gives you item by item, shift + page up/down gives you pages of them.
When you are in a long document or webpage and are trying to scan the text for something and use your mouse to do something on the page, page up/down is often faster than the scroll bar and your mouse if free for pointing and selecting.
Page up/down works as previous/next in many media applications.
When you write text, see that you made a mistake in the middle of the sentence, correct it and then hit home or end to jump to the beginning/end of the sentence in one action.
When you want to select text pressing shift + left/right selects letter by letter, shift + ctrl + left/right selects a word, then shift + home/end selects the line.
In a browser home/end will bring you to the beginning/end of a page. Especially useful for long pages. In a text editor it does the same by adding ctrl to the mix.
Games and specialized software like 3d and cad use these keys all the time for all kinds of functionality.
They may not be the most glamorous keys, but they are very useful in many situations.
Middle mouse click is so much more useful as the navigation tool that it is. Using it for something completely unrelated like pasting is degeneracy.
Actually, any text manipulation assigned to the mouse is completely ignoring the functionality of the 2 normal input devices on a normal computer.
That is someone applying imperial system logic to the metric system. No one in their right mind uses fractions to describe 15cm.