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Comment by donnachangstein | Hacker News Reader

The lack of a universally functioning clipboard is the #1 blocker to Linux acceptance on the desktop.

The Mac had this figured out in 1984. Linux still struggles in 2025.

Hey, they don't have excel or word, like I have at work, and none of the other professional software like Photoshop or premiere, I can't play AAA games, and none of my friends use it either. But that's cool. The clipboard though... that I cannot abide.

Put another way, I strongly disagree that the clipboard is the main obstacle. (And fwiw, Linux has been my main OS for decades)

You got it backwards. Mmb used to work flawlessly in Linux as in other X11 based unices "back in the day" before some DEs decided they would do it differently to be more palatable to people used to $OTHER_OS I don't remember the details as I'm never been a desktop person, but I do remember that I got surprised one day to discover that something that simple ceased to be reliable.

Wow as a non Linux user I would never have even imagined this would be an issue - why would you use an OS that doesn’t just let you ctrl c/x/v?

In practice, it's not really an issue. In some applications (most notably terminal emulators, where ctrl+c is already used to terminate a process) you have to use an alternative combination (e.g. ctrl+shift+c).

MacOS neatly avoids this issue with the command key, but I'm not sure what happens in Windows.

The common shortcuts do work in 99% of situations. The primary exception is terminals.

The problem is mainly that Linux has two clipboards running simultaneously, with slightly different behaviors.

In reality, the clipboard works fine. There are some gotchas, but for everyday use it's perfectly fine. The opinion expressed by parent comment is, uh, unconventional. I've never heard this take before. Most people consider Linux clipboards an annoyance that we should fix someday, it's not a showstopper by any means (for average users)

I just tend to completely forget the select-clipboard even exists - right until a HN submission reminds me, or I drop some garbage in the middle of the text I'm writing.

Text-wise the only thing I can think of where clipboards don't Just Work is indeed terminals, but I hardly consider that an issue in practice. Either it's a trivial session and I'll happily right-click to paste, or I'm in tmux and using lead key prefixes for shortcuts already.

Cross-app rich media copy/paste does have a habit of being a bit buggy from time to time, though...

I like them being separate. The main one feels more intentional than the selection buffer, which I mostly use for grabbing text I want right now. I'd be annoyed if my main clipboard got overwritten every time I selected text.

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