Comment 191 for bug 11334

Saïvann : It's not only up to xserver-xorg to fix this. There is an independent Freedesktop specification outlining how the clipboard works. It says clearly that all applications, when quitting should export the clipboard contents to the global clipboard.

xserver-xorg actually adheres to the specification properly. It's actually everything else which are behaving incorrectly (a couple of them actually already work properly). So I wouldn't say that it's up to xserver-xorg to break the spec and fix this.

If anything, maybe the spec should be improved, then xserver-xorg will be obliged to fix the behaviour. However I never felt technically comfortable enough to start a discussion on the Freedesktop mailing list since I don't feel I understand the underlying issues well enough.

That being said, if the Canonical usability decided to focus on the clipboard for a release, the absolute bare-minimum that they would do would be to correct the behaviour of all applications installed by default. This would be a massive improvement already. They would probably also work with the Freedesktop spec in order to improve it (as they did with the notification area and are doing with the application indicators). Who knows, with any luck they could improve the clipboard beyond how it is implemented in Windows/Mac.

One thing that stands out to me, is that there are no launchpad bugs for each independent application linked to this one. Someone should really go and find/submit the related bugs and link them to this one.