Comment 72 for bug 106644

It's up to the owner of the active selection to copy it from the PRIMARY buffer to the CLIPBOARD buffer upon closing or the selection dies with the window which is closed. This is not an Ubuntu bug or an X bug just to be clear, but a lack of adherence to the X Windows protocol. Xserver negotiates networked messages between clients since Unix and Linux where built with networking in mind.

For those people who think Cntrl+c Cntrl+vis the only way to copy try highlighting some text, change windows to another text input area and click your middle mouse button (the mouse wheel) and this allows you to press 1 button rather than 4 to do the same operation. Shift+Insert does the same.

Now, just imagine there are people out there who would actually select, right click, navigate a popup window that took 3 seconds to appear, click copy, click-raise another window, right click, navigate the 3 second life sucking popup again, click paste, and then say I hate computers after taking 6 or 7 steps to do the same operation. Now multiply this tasking by 1000 and you will really start to see life wasting away. Virus scan? defrag? reg clean? ...ouch... it hurts..!