You must be joking

X has these things called selections. How they are used is defined outside X, you could run an X server and a suite of apps that had no selections, or had a dozen all named after capital cities. X does not care.

For interoperability you need to agree how to use them. The ICCCM provided a good enough description for its day, but apparently in the late 1990s reading comprehension among software developers declined, and Qt managed to screw it up repeatedly, so there is also a FD.O document which spells it out.

So, this names selections including PRIMARY and CLIPBOARD. The PRIMARY selection is to be set to whatever the user last explicitly selected. By convention apps ask for the contents of this selection and insert it when you press middle-button.

The CLIPBOARD selection is maintained separately by explicit cut or copy operations. Most apps ask for the contents of this selection when you use their paste operation.

Selections are also used in drag-and-drop functionality. They have several features that the average My First Clipboard idea doesn't handle

• Low overhead. Rather than storing whatever you select or cut into some OS-provided "clipboard" where it will mysteriously waste a lot of RAM*, the selections exist only in the source application until needed. X just tracks a window ID and a timestamp.
• Content-negotiated. Rather than forcing everything into a lowest common denominator like plain text, the source app can offer various formats and the recipient chooses
• Network transparent. So long as you actually do it with X (rather than sending a filename as per some suggestions in this thread) you get network transparency. Copy from the remote xterm, paste into the local web browser.

Really the worst problem is that application developers don't care. They refuse to "pay their taxes" as it has been called, by implementing features that require some work on their part to deliver a better experience for the end user across all applications. This isn't just about the clipboard, it's a widespread problem. They may hard-code a date format that annoys non-Americans, or misbehave when multiple monitors are used, or any number of things. And it's not just on X, this is a problem on every platform, only the specifics vary.

I really mean it about them not caring. For a while I filed bugs against apps that got this stuff wrong. But the response was almost always hostile.

* A lot of designs don't consider this. Users expect that somehow the computer "knows" that they intended to just throw away the 50MB of charts they just cut from a document, but they needed to keep the 15MB image they cut the next day. There are no ultimate solutions here, like window focus it's a matter of best effort.