For some stupid reason I don’t even want to try to understand, Google Chrome sometimes won’t allow you to select text. Apparently it thinks you have a touch device.

How to fix:

Open the configuration file (in my case, on a Ubuntu box it is /usr/share/applications/google-chrome.desktop) and append --touch-devices=123 to all the lines that start with Exec=.

To do that in the command line you can run the following command:

sudo sed -i "s/\(Exec=.*\)$/\1 --touch-devices=123/g" /usr/share/applications/google-chrome.desktop

You may want to append --touch-devices=123 when you call google-chrome from the CLI and even create an alias for that:

alias google-chrome="google-chrome --touch-devices=123"

Thanks to Josué for digging very deep on the internet and finding the fix!