[lotharcable]

X11's model for 'cut buffers', 'primary', and 'clipboard' is a historically bad design.

Like very easily in the top 10 worst designs in computer science history.

The fact that it managed to work at all is a testament to the millions of man-hours people were willing to pour into polishing a turd to make Linux Desktop a reality.

If we had the ability to go back in a time machine and do it again it is now painfully obvious that X11 should of been completely abandoned by the mid-1980s. This would of saved a huge amount of heartache.

[dfox]

Cut buffers are different thing than selections and cut buffers are deprecated and probably not used by anything written in last 25-30 years.

On the other hand cut buffers are so simple that there isn't any of the complexity as with selections. But still I think that the ICCCM/Wayland model of selections is the only sane way how to implement clipboard, because it does not involve creating some kind of shared state of potentially unbounded size and consuming potentially unbounded CPU time doing that even if it will not be used.