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It used to be the case that clicking and dragging a file with a middle mouse button would pull up a very helpful prompt for when I wanted to do not the default action (the answer to a very old question about Windows-like right-click and drag describes exactly what I'm talking about, with screenshots).

This functionality broke (or vanished?) in Bionic, and apparently never got fixed for Focal. I know I used to use this all the time in multiple versions up through Xenial. I used it back in GNOME 2.x, I know it worked for me when I had to use Unity for a bit, and once MATE was available it worked in that on Trusty and Xenial. I continued to use MATE through Bionic and Focal where it has not been working. If I fire up GNOME (now 3.x, I suppose) in a VM, then I can't get this to work there either.

Does anyone know how to restore this incredibly useful functionality to not need both hands to insist on my intended move/copy/link action over what the computer assumes to be the "correct" one based on source/destination?

Turnip Wizard
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  • "*broken in Bionic*" - Between xenial and bionic the desktop environment switched from Unity to GNOME3. All of the versions you say it's "broken" use GNOME3 and the others use a different DE. The feature is not so broken as it's missing. Unity is no longer being developed by Canonical and it's no longer an official flavor for Ubuntu, but there are several other [official flavors](https://ubuntu.com/download/flavours) that offer more user customization options and features that aren't available, or are hard to configure in GNOME3. You can "Try Ubuntu" flavors without having to install. – Nmath Nov 23 '20 at 09:13
  • Oh, I seem to have been unclear in a key detail: I was already using MATE (where this was successfully working) by Xenial. I used to use GNOME2, then there was an in-between period where I had to use Unity, and some time during Trusty I successfully moved myself to MATE. So far as I recall, throughout all of those this functionality worked. It was moving from MATE in Xenial to MATE in Bionic where this went away, so I don't think it's a desktop environment thing alone? (Sorry for edit, I always forget it's *[Shift]*+[Enter] for newline in some places.) – Turnip Wizard Nov 23 '20 at 17:39

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