14 DAY TRIAL // As reported by Softpedia last week, the GNOME developers decided to remove the "paste" function from the middle-click mouse button, which would have been used to start selections and provide text contextual menus.
It looks like the GNOME user had a saying in this, as the GNOME development team re-implemented middle-click paste, as part of the second Beta release of the GNOME Settings Daemon 3.10 package, which was made available for download two days ago, on September 2, followed by another small release today, September 4, 2013.
Anyhow, if middle-click paste is removed in GNOME 3.12, the next major version or the controversial desktop environment, which should be released in spring 2014, users will still be able to activate it via the GNOME Tweak Tool application. Let's hope that will not be the case, as middle-click paste is extremely important for Linux users!
In the same news, GNOME Settings Daemon 3.10 Beta 2 disables animations in more situations for remote display, ignores softtoken for smartcards, adds a test application for updates, notifies users about available offline updates, and fixes a crash in Rfkill.
Moreover, the second Beta release of the upcoming GNOME Settings Daemon 3.10 package allows building against CUPS (Common UNIX Printing System) 1.5, fixes an error handling in the DBus API to avoid assertions, display notifications on timezone changes, uses reverse geocoding for country detection, uses libgweather timezone information too, and avoids popping up polkit password prompts.
GNOME Settings Daemon 3.10 Beta 2.1 (the actual version is 3.9.91.1) was released earlier today and it modifies the package to adapt to geoclue 1.99.3 API changes, to fix a screensaver crash, and to support the KDE variant of the screensaver's interface.
Download GNOME Settings Daemon 3.10 Beta 2 right now from Softpedia. Remember that this is a beta version and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended for testing purposes only.