The primary clipboard is cleared when you click to position mouse pointer in a text component.

GNOME developers seem not to get it at all.

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=333514

The result is you can use PRIMARY to paste into a new Gedit document, you can paste content from gedit to itself as long as you don't click to set the pointer after making the selection. All horribly inconsistent with what I think is one of the best features of X, the automatic selection of text on highlight.

Has annoyed me once too often......

# apt-get install vim-gnome

Wonder also how this got declined as a papercut bug in Ubuntu....