Middle-click paste broken in Chrome on Fedora 44 Cosmic

The Problem

On Fedora 44 with the COSMIC desktop, middle-click paste does not work inside Chrome 147. Selecting text in a terminal or any other app and pasting it into Chrome with the middle mouse button did nothing.

Selecting text inside Chrome and pasting it elsewhere worked fine — so only the receiving side was broken.

Root Cause

Chrome 144+ started respecting the GTK gtk-enable-primary-paste GSettings key, which controls whether middle-click paste (PRIMARY selection) is enabled. Recent versions of gsettings-desktop-schemas ship this setting as false by default — a deliberate GNOME decision to disable middle-click paste out of the box. Chrome now obeys that preference.

Relevant upstream reports:

• Chromium: Chrome does not respect GNOME middle-click paste setting
• gsettings-desktop-schemas MR !119: disable gtk-enable-primary-paste by default
• The commit that changed the default to false

Fix

One command, then restart Chrome:

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface gtk-enable-primary-paste true
pkill -f chrome

Verify the current value first if you want:

gsettings get org.gnome.desktop.interface gtk-enable-primary-paste

If it prints false, that is the culprit. After setting it to true and restarting, middle-click paste works normally again.