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Is KDE 4.0 the Holy Grail of Desktops?
An anonymous reader writes "With KDE 4.0 being expected some time this year, expectation runs high in the linux/unix users camp and the media read a lot between the lines of what the KDE developers say and do. In some ways KDE will provide a standard as to how a desktop should look and behave. This interesting article wonders whether KDE 4.0 will become the complete desktop which will meet the needs of a wide cross section of computer users. One of the common complaints that some Linux users have over KDE is that it is too cluttered. And by addressing this need without putting off the power users, the KDE developers could make it an all in one Desktop. Keep in mind that KDE 4.0 is based on Qt 4.0 and so can be easily ported to Windows and other OSes too which makes this thought doubly relevant."
Vista will be superior, ALWAYS
You can pass a switch to disable explorer as a shell. That is why things like LiteStep are called Shell Replacements.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
... in 3D like pages in a Rolodex, then I'm not interested. (sarcasm off)
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
Because if they did, they might notice that blog post talks more about Dolphin than anything else, and has virtually nothing to say about whether or not KDE 4.0 is the Holy Grail of desktops.
Hope they get some click-throughs from the traffic though.
The Southern Baptist Convention has creationism. On Slashdot, we have porn.
Because QT 3 isn't available under GPL for Windows or Mac, while QT 4 is. Next question?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Ever since Windows 3.1, and even today, you do not have to run "Explorer" as your desktop.
A lot of people don't realize this, but the whole of the windows "desktop" - the task bar, the icons, the menus, the right click on the desktop, all runs under a single instance of the "explorer" process.
Via the registry you can change your shell to anything - including the old progman.exe from Windows 3.1 if you have it lying around (heck it even shipped with Windows until Windows 2000). I have switched my shell to Afterstep many times.
There is no logical reason you couldn't switch to KDE as your desktop environment after it had all been ported to windows. It would not have any kind of a built-in performance hit.
I'm not quite sure what the parent is talking about... Highlight some text, go to another app and press the middle mouse button, and presto, copying has occurred. Am I missing something?
Why would you run another desktop on top of Windows? Wouldn't you take a performance hit for running two desktops, in essence?
Say you want to transition your office or whatever to use all Linux and OSS. You can get them used to open office, but they still be a bit put off when you make them switch to KDE. This way they can get used to "linux" while still having access to their favorite windows apps. I think it'd be a great idea for preparing people for a transition.
If you are about to mod me down, keep in mind that this post was most likely sarcastic.
Ok, I recently switched from Gnome to KDE 3.5 and really have no plans to go back, but saying something which isn't even close to finished is "most-bestest" would seem to be jumping the gun.
I'm sure we can find as many blog entries about how Vista is most-bestest, or Gnome, or Xfce. Of those, I'd only ever buy the Xfce argument but to each their own.
I also hope that this release will make KDE fonts look sharp, crisp and beautiful by default. It is unfortunate that many times, we in the Linux community have to seek Microsoft's help on fonts in order to have a desktop that is a pleasure to look at.
It's not about running a whole new DE, it's about running KDE applications on other platforms.
Hardly.
Don't get me wrong -- I'm a huge fan of KDE. KDE is the project that made me think "yes, I will eventually be able to learn to use Linux" -- that was back in its 1.0 days. Now I use Linux full time (I still consider myself a beginner though). KDE is a good desktop -- it's knaming konventions are a klittle kstrange, but it's still a good desktop that makes basic Linux use a lot easier while not actually preventing you from getting into the guts of everything. It's my desktop of choice (I use Kubuntu).
But the Holy Grail of Desktops? There is no such beast, and there are too many opinions about what such a beast would be. There are too many people who want too many different things in their desktop. For my part, I want to see some desktop incorporate all the OO elements from OS/2's Workplace Shell... I've yet to see it happen. That's my "Holy Grail," and I expect if it were ever implemented it would be anathema to someone else.
The very thought that it might be able to "meet the needs of a wide cross section of computer users" would automatically make it fail in the eyes of some. I know and have spoken with some usability nuts who claim that there is One True Path to usability, and anyone who wants to do things differently is simply doing things WRONG, and that they need to learn the One True Path and experience how much better it is. "Acommodation" would be a design flaw from that perspective.
All that aside, I'm looking forward to KDE 4. One thing I've come to expect from the KDE developers is that everytime they release a new version of KDE I wind up liking the new version significantly more than the older version, and I think that's the most realistic expectation you can hope to have about software...
Eviscerati.Org: All Hail the Eviscerati
Pfft - my KDE desktop copies/pastes between all applications on Open Suse and Fedora. Plus, with the Klipper, I can paste things that I copied a while ago. I deem it superior.
I'm a student. I write iPhone apps.
That's mostly true. Aren't good cross-platform toolkits spiffy?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
As far as I'm concerned, the perfect desktop is Windowmaker.
I use it on OpenBSd and Linux and it works nearly perfect.
I think I must have got the wrong article from that link. The one I read said that there may be a replacement for Konqueror called Dolphin but that Konqueror would still be available if people wanted it.
Was the one about KDE Being The Holy Grail Of The Modern Desktop anymore interesting ?
what-does-that-make-gnome-then
The Holy Hand Grenade
He means a copy paste functionality ala COM/Windows. Where you can copy and paste from any browser windows then paste it into any email client/word processor and keep the format. Or it can translate the data depending of the COM filter ..
... etc
... as they/we spend our whole life using computers only as tools not for development issues ... I am not working in programming anymore and my only issue with a comp that I have at the office is that it can sends emails, cut time spent in my daily tasks, and in my job, Windows is, for now, better suited for that.
It is quite nifty in an office environment to copy paste a screenshot, the content of a browser window, application data
You see, alot of people whose job is not IT related need these kind of functionalities
I am not a pro-windows guy nor a MS employee, refrain from modding me from what I stated above, which is only my own and personal opinion, and, you are, of course, allowed to disagree with me.
Don't you know it is now both immoral and criminal to think beyond the next quarterly report?
Yes, everything still works. If you've tried blackbox for windows, GeOShell, or Litestep, you'll notice everything still works. What would KDE make different about that? It's not like it goes off and assinates MFC and SWF.NET to replace them with libqt
"I think an etch-a-sketch with an ethernet port would beat IE7 in web standards compliance."
KDE looks so tinker-toy with all its icons and crap.
Though, they both seem to have issues with me customizing them. Yeah, it's possible, but the options I want are always hidden in some gconfedit.cf.conf.1.3 bullcrap file somewhere.
I don't want a new window every time I click a folder. I like to store my files heirarchically, and nest directories. I don't see how this makes me a bad person. Don't bury the option to turn that shit off. It was annoying in Windows 3.1, it's just as annoying on a linux box.
And KDE really needs a "lite" checkbox somewhere, to turn off all the bling blang for those of who choose not to "keeps it real".
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
What I don't understand is why they're saying Dolphin and Konqueror are the same thing.
Konqueror started out as a file manager, true, but KDE tacked on web browsing to it and then spent most of the time developing that aspect of it -- now it's really more of a web browser that does file management too, rather than a file manager on steroids.
With Dolphin they appear to have recognized this and are creating an application to focus on what Konqueror was originally intended to do in the first place. This isn't exactly the same as creating a beginner's app and a power-user's app...
Eviscerati.Org: All Hail the Eviscerati
Cool. Now we can ask Dell for windows boxes running KDE :-)
. . .does it run on Emacs?
You are not the customer.
The WIN32 API is basically just a collection of library files (dlls) in the c:\windows\* folders. Not running explorer doesn't effect that. You'd just have a different program to organize your desktop, launch applications, etc. Programs access the Win32 API by making calls into those DLLs. As long as you don't delete the DLLs, your API is still there. You'd loose explorer specific functionality--ie, things like adding WinRAR to your context menu--might not work if whoever compiled KDE for Windows didn't ensure that part worked, but it won't prevent any of your individual applications from running and working with each other.
Of course, if you're using KDE on Windows as a migration step towards KDE on Linux, once you move to Linux the WIN32 API disappears along with the windows apps.
Several KDE 3 apps have already been ported to OS X, such as kwrite as QT3 is available under the GPL on OS X. KDE developers have said that KDE 4 will be portable to other architectures including OS X amd Win32. However this doesn't mean they intend to port port the entire desktop to, say, OS X. Rather the apps themselves will be portable. This is arguably more important than porting the entire desktop. However, Having the KDE desktop replacing explorer on win32 would be wonderful. KDE still won't make Vista any less obnoxious, though. I am looking forward to running great KDE apps like Amarok on my OS X box at some point in the future, though.
In the meantime, Gnome is coming along quite nicely too. Neither gnome nor KDE is the be-all, end-all, last word in desktop environments, though. They both will continue to evolve and develop. More and more cooperation among the two camps through the freedesktop project is happening. Major problems have now been solved, including the clipboard frustrations of years past, drag-and-drop, and removable device handling through dbus. In fact with Qt4, since the glib main event loop can be used, it's becoming possible to mix gtk and qt widgets in the same app, which is handy for plugin developers. Problems yet to be solved include a common theming subsystem, a common virtual filesystem layer (a la kioslaves), and a few other things.
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
Right! They should behave like the serious folks in Microsoft calling everything with the full beautiful "Windows" before the app name instead of a little "K": Windows Mail, Windows Firewall, Windows Media Player. Or Apple, using a slick, minuscule "i" instead of a boasting "K": iPod, iTunes, etc. True, big companies really HAVE grown the fuck up!
[sarcasm mode off]-- Patent no.123456: A way to personalize
So you're saying that merely doing everything Windows does it not enough, it's got to be MUCH better.
1. standardized operation for ALL applicatation.
Windows doesn't. At all. Even MS apps aren't all the same, especially between generations.
2. cut and paste between ALL applications.
KDE does this. See a thread above.
3. Applications must ALL be uniform in operation of common functions..
I assume you mean dialog boxes. Windows doesn't guarantee it, and neither does KDE. It provides the same (and more) functionality that Windows does, though.
4. Uniform operation of input devices (mouse)..
Dunno what you mean here... Seems pretty uniform to me. (Heck, X/KDE even assumes every mouse only has 2 buttons. How much more uniform can you get?)
5. Easily customizable..
You might have something here... Too bad KDE is MUCH more customizeable than Windows, especially straight out of the box.
6. Standardized behavour on any local or remote environment..
Windows can't even touch this one.
7. Some kind of direct video support (games, etc...).
Windows doesn't do this. It provides an API for it through a non-essential set of libraries. (DirectX) Everything has OpenGL, so this point is moot.
Unless you were talking about Apple's interface... But why KDE would rule the market by only beating Apple, which doesn't rule the market, is byond me.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Well, you can call it broken by design or working by design, but there are (last time I checked) two separate ways to use a clipboard. The Linux way that you just described (select and middle-click), or the Windows way (Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V). Those two are completely separate, you can't copy one way and paste the other. This can work one of four ways:
1. Disable Linux clipboard. Hell breaks loose.
2. Disable Windowsish clipboard. Hell breaks loose.
3. Merge clipboards. Hell breaks loose as Windows userrs have their clipboard contents "mysteriously" replaced.
4. Keep it as is and have slashdot trolls complain about the copy-paste system.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Yes, obviously it should be the Holy Krail. Someone might mistake it for a Gnome thing if it begun with a G.
Personally, I find the defauly Windows XP GUI patronising and completely unusable - I much prefer the Windows "Classic" desktop, the only thing missing from it is a proper dual pane file manager that shows one directory in the left window, another in the right window and a number of easily accessible commands for working with files beneath each window (a la Midnight Commander or Directory Opus).
KDE is also nice but far too flashy and bloaty for a power user like me - given the choice between KDE and Gnome, I choose Gnome but even then with some reservations about the wasted screen real estate with Gnome.
But if I need a GUI enviroment that just allows me to have multiple shells or apps running, without too much need for filetype integration (so that when I double-click on, say, a JPEG image icon, a viewer application opens the image for me) then XFCE4 is a good compromise for usability and speed.
I can see *ABSOLUTELY NO NEED* for 3D file explorers on 3D desktops unless you simply want a fashion accessory just to show off to friends. Unless you use a PC for gaming (which admittedly I do quite a lot), then everything else you do on it is about productivity and using an application to get a job done quickly and easily - if any desktop effects do not make that productivity work any faster, then they are a complete and total waste of time.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
If you are a full-on Free Software advocate and only care about writing free/open source software, then I can see why KDE/Qt is usually the best choice. On the other hand, if you are interested in commercial development, like myself, you need to look at pricing as well. If you only want to develop for Windows, then the "SDK" is free and the "IDE" can range from free to a couple of grand with a premium MSDN subscription. But Qt itself costs around $1780 to $6600 on a per developer basis depending on console/GUI one/two/three platform development. If you work for a company with any clout, you can probably cut that cost in half for either platform.
Although I'm not doing anything now, the first thing I would use for a lean startup cross platform development is ACE with wxWidgets on Visual Studio Express or Eclipse with CDT.
It is just my opinion, but I think the pricing for Qt is too high. I wonder how big the Linux Desktop "pie" could grow if we could all settle on Qt if it fell under LGPL or BSD? Trolltech's smaller piece of a bigger pie, might still be bigger than the one they have now. Putting GPL/Free Software asisde for a second, from a commercial perspective, I don't want a "new Microsoft" on the Linux Desktop. Perhaps someone with some cash could revive the Harmony Toolkit...
For instance halflife.exe is a good shell for windows.
©God
So you're saying that merely doing everything Windows does it not enough, it's got to be MUCH better.
1) Nobody said anything about Windows. Why are Linux users so unable to let Linux stand on its own? You never see Mac users constantly comparing everything about OS X to Windows, instead they judge OS X on its own merits and criticize it for its own failings.
Have you ever seen those cartoons with the bulldog who's constantly being circled by the annoying yipping puppy sucking up to him? Linux is like the puppy. It's irritating.
2) If Linux wants to gain users, yes, it has to be much better than Windows. I would think that obvious.
2. cut and paste between ALL applications.
KDE does this. See a thread above.
Only for text. Try copying (say) spreadsheet cells and pasting them in a bitmap graphics program. Or try copying a few seconds of a video file and pasting it in a word processing document.
3. Applications must ALL be uniform in operation of common functions..
I assume you mean dialog boxes. Windows doesn't guarantee it, and neither does KDE. It provides the same (and more) functionality that Windows does, though.
Not just dialog boxes, but also:
* Keyboard shortcuts
* Menu items
* Contents and ordering of contextual menus
* Open and Print dialogs (which you mentioned)
* Button labels
* What the "Home" and "End" button do in text fields
etc.
5. Easily customizable..
You might have something here... Too bad KDE is MUCH more customizeable than Windows, especially straight out of the box.
He didn't say "more customizable" he said easily customizable. If you don't know the difference between those two statements, you really have no business critiquing a UI.
But why KDE would rule the market by only beating Apple, which doesn't rule the market, is byond me.
It would only rule the market if it:
1) Beat Apple's OS X
2) Beat Microsoft's Windows
3) Was compatible with, or had feature-complete equivalents to, all software that runs on OS X or Windows, including custom-developed programs
4) Ran on affordable hardware and was itself affordable (both in monetary cost, and in support costs)
Right now, no Linux environment (KDE included) is even remotely close.
Comment of the year
[Sorry for the bad formatting, this is the same thing again. That'll teach me to use preview first.]
As current Linux user that mixes everyday Gnome, KDE, and desktop-agnostic apps at home and work, I can assure you the "clipboard hell" issue has not been fixed at all. And I'm not anti-Linux trolling, I'm a Debian fan and used to be a package maintainer there. But you should be able to admit where Linux is just weaker than Windows or OS X.
Here's an extract of the various "clipboards" or "yank buffers" or whatever they're called I deal with on a daily basis:
- The venerable X11 buffer - select and middle click. This works great BUT if you happen to select something by mistake whatever you had in the clipboard before has gone. This is especially annoying if you select a link from somewhere and want to *replace* the URL in the address bar of Firefox. What you intuitevely do is the following:
1. Select the link in some program
2. Alt-Tab to Firefox
3. Select the link currently in the location bar (in order to replace it)
4. You just lost because the second selection replaced the first.
- Then there is the Gnome Clipboard (I believe that's what it is called). This is the Control-C, Control-V clipboard which works like in Windows - with one subtle difference. If you close the program you have cut/copied from, the content of the clipboard is *gone*.
1. Select and copy some text in some program
2. Close the program
3. You just lost
- Then there is the vim yank buffer. Yes, you can have multiple yank buffers and probably program them and whatever. But it is totally separate from the other clipboards. Vim even stores it when you close and restart vim. Thus you can:
1. Open vim, yank some text (that's "copy" for non-vimmers)
2. Reboot your machine
3. Log in from another machine with ssh
4. Paste it back. You win!
BUT of course it doesn't work across multiple concurrently running instances of vim. Don't tell me that I should use only one vim for multiple files and splits and all that crap. I want to be able to yank and paste across vims. Which you can't.
And if you use gvim (the vim with gui) then pasting from the Gnome clipboard is as easy as...pressing (no joke)
ESC : " g P
They must be out of their mind.
- And then there's the Emacs buffers (I believe it's called the "buffer ring" or something like that) which are again similar to the ones in vim. I hope I don't offend any emacs users here since I'm not that familiar with it, but I know that they are again incompatible with everything else.
What Linux needs is ONE universal clipboard. Just ONE. It shouldn't be part of Gnome, KDE, Xfce or even X11. It should be a system service. So you can copy and paste LIKE A SANE PERSON in ALL PROGRAMS. Just like on Windows. Or a Mac.
You could throw in persistence across reboots. And maybe across different sessions (say, local X11 and remote SSH). Then it would even be better than everything else. I'm actually thinking of implementing something like that - maybe even with X11 and Gnome clipboard bindings to "unify" them finally.
There should *definitely not* be multiple buffers, rings and crap like that. 99% of the time they are just confusing.
If a program *really* needs multiple buffers - and most do not - they could still implement that ON TOP of the universal clipboard. It's ok if *that* is not compatible across programs.
Greetings from one who loves, and loves to works with Linux but just *HATES* its clipboard functionality.
The workspace (that would be mostly KWin and Plasma) won't be ported to Windows. Only applications will.
Excepted it doesn't disable the window manager AFAIK.
The key I know about is "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\Shell"
I've used it to start cygwin xwin X server in place of explorer, but if you're launching a win32 app, it still has XP borders. And if you're launching a browser window, it will launch the full desktop.
Is there an equivalent to 'nautilus --no-desktop' for MS explorer ?
Is there a mean to replace the whole window manager ?
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
1. standardized operation for ALL applicatation.
--> It does, check out dcop or it's replacement d-bus. Through shell, perl, c++, qt... you can communicate between any application in both fore- and background.
2. cut and paste between ALL applications..
Has done that for a while now...
3. Applications must ALL be uniform in operation of common functions..
That's up to the programmers mainly, but all decent KDE applications use the standard QT library
4. Uniform operation of input devices (mouse)..
What's your problem with that? Any mouse I connect works and the mouse buttons too. Mainly an issue of configuration (which can be done from within KDE), doesn't matter which OS you use.
5. Easily customizable..
Check out kde-look.org, I think there's even a plugin into the Themes section of your configuration that automagically downloads them.
6. Standardized behavour on any local or remote environment..
That's up to the environment server. I connect through X or VNC, looks the same as my desktop at home.
7. Some kind of direct video support (games, etc...).
That's up to the Operating System, not to a desktop environment. And those solutions are available, it's called OpenGL and SDL, too bad only good game developers dare to use portable, industry standards instead of closed API's they don't even have full support for (take a look at the UT engine, Doom engine, Cube engine).
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Whereas KDE policy is "If you disKover some empty spaKe, add an useless feature or somethinK very very irritatinK. The iKon must be shiny, rotatinK, and Kontain at least one K.", the GNOME policy is the opposite: "If you find a feature, it might confuse a user, so remove it." [1]
You never see Mac users constantly comparing everything about OS X to Windows, instead they judge OS X on its own merits and criticize it for its own failings.
Really? I thought Mac users' sole purpose in life is to endlessly compare OSX with Windows.
For all intensive porpoises your a bunch of rediculous loosers
Dynamic binding defeats CPU branch prediction regardless of how it's implemented -- if the target of a jump instruction is taken from a pointer whose value is determined at run-time, rather than compiled into the program, it can't be predicted. Ordinary C structures containing function pointers, like GNOME uses, work the same way. This isn't a problem with C++ virtual functions; it's just that current processors aren't able to accelerate a certain technique that's often used in modern software design.
As for the extraneous symbols, GCC 4.0 introduced some facilities for suppressing them, and I'm pretty sure KDE uses them now, so that should no longer be an issue.
My only real issue with KDE's programming environment is that they don't use standard C++; they use a variant of C++ that's "enhanced" with syntactic support for signals and slots, and the code gets preprocessed into standard C++ at build time. That's a bit ugly.
Yeah, you hack and slash the explorer.exe and pray the M$ gods favor your creation.
Have a look at bbLean, a Windows version of Blackbox. I think it does what you want.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Hear hear! I've been using KDE for years, and every once in a while I experiment with Gnome. I like it, but the lack of some utility (quick and simple file operations across SFTP / SMB / local filesystems using Konqueror springs immediately to mind here) always sends me back to KDE
You know, there's no need to use KDE to use Konqueror. I use Konqueror with Fluxbox, for Chrissakes.
2. Alt-Tab to Firefox
3. Select the link currently in the location bar (in order to replace it)
4. You just lost because the second selection replaced the first. There's no need to paste the address into the location bar -- just middle-click somewhere in a browser tab, and it will load the page. If you hold down Ctrl while you paste, it will open a new tab. IMO this is a perfect example how X11's clipboard logic is way superior to the logic on Macs and Windows.
On Windows I have two additional steps:
1'. Ctrl-C to copy the selected text into the clipboard
3. either Ctrl-L into the location bar or Ctrl-T open a new tab
3'. Ctrl-V the address into the location bar
Awesome. I haven't seen a troll like that in a while. You've got 6 people responding to you point by point. Very nice.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Try Krusader. Dual pain MC like file management chock full of KDE goodness. Best File Manager Ever.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
You call it a bug, I call it a feature. People make the same complaint about the Linux kernel, GNU readline, and so on. If you want a proprietary-friendly OS, go use Windows or OS X.
Though it would have been nice if the effort expended on GNOME had instead been expended on a BSD-licensed Qt replacement... Or improving OpenStep... or pretty much anything except developing a third desktop environment and stuffing it with Microsoft patented technology.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Ok, but CAN it do that?
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
KDE4-for-windows is supposed to use the Windows WM. Porting KDE 4 to windows doesn't mean porting EVERY piece of KDE of KDE 4 to windows.
Notice that in XP the WM is inside the kernel so in XP is just impossible to replace it.
Well in that case, you have no problem. Qt for X11 is available under the QPL, which permits applications to use a range of free software licenses, including the LGPL and BSD-style.
Guess you'll be switching now then?
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
I think it's great.
They are modern day Robin Hoods, except legal!
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
What, no profit?????
Only three things are certain; death, taxes, and apocryphal quotations - Ben Franklin.
Sorry, but I'm going to be a bit pedantic here.
You have described one clipboard (Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V), and it's the Mac way, not the Windows way. Macs originally implemented this with Cmd-C, Cmd-V (and -X, of course) because the Apple UI people were smart enough to realize that Ctrl-C and Ctrl-X already had some important (and somewhat dangerous [kill, cancel]) standardized meanings that shouldn't be messed with. Early PCs did not have a command key, so early Windows versions decided to copy this feature, but using the Ctrl key instead, and to hell with standards.
The Linux way you describe is actually an X11 feature that predates Linux (and probably Windows cut/paste), and it's not really a clipboard at all. Middle-click copies the "primary selection", not the clipboard. The distinction is lost on many (I said I was going to be pedantic...) but technically selections are a protocol for implementing clipboards. By default there is a primary, secondary, and a clipboard selection, and those can contain many separate buffers of data. (The xclipboard client lets you manipulate the clipboard buffers, if you're curious.) But middle-click in X doesn't hit the clipboard selection at all, but rather the primary selection. You can use this to copy/paste stuff without messing with the contents of your clipboard, which might doing more important things.
So X selections are really a superset of clipboards. As with everything in Unixland, this imparts a lot of power for those who have been initiated into its mysteries, but creates confusion in those who have not, and hostility in those who think the broken Windows way is the right way.