@PJH said:
Because I don't want my clipboard contents trashed because I've selected something (either accidentally, or because I'm going to do something with that selection like move it or drag and drop it)?
There are actually two clipboards (at least in my ubuntu unity environment): The ctrl-c/ctrl-v clipboard, and the select/middle-click clipboard.
It works well for me, though there's one problem with the gnome terminal emulator: Selecting something and then hitting ctrl-c doesn't copy the selected content to the ctrl-c clipboard. (I guess it would kill the currently running process, because that's what ctrl-c *usually* does on a terminal) So I need to use the "select/middle click" clipboard from the terminal. Like, when I am viewing a log file in a terminal and want to google for some log message, I select the text and then I want to paste it into the firefox search box. However, double-clicking into the search box (to select all text, then delete, then middle-click) will select any old text in the search box and therefore remove the log message from the clipboard. That's pretty annoying. [strike]Luckily, firefox now supports "right click->paste and search" (or whatever it is called in english), which is a workaround for my only problem with linux clipboards. :)[/strike] (whoops, that's a lie. Of course that will paste thectrl-c clipboard. The actual workaround is to click into the box, then hold ctrl-delete and then ctrl-backspace until the box is empty, then middle click.)
I like how easy it is to set up and keep up to date most development environments on most Linux distros. Also, unity is fine IMO. I like win7, but I almost never use it because I'm used to ubuntu, and I'm tired of having to do most application updates manually. Never used a mac, so I can't really say anything about macs.