Different philosophy, partly motivated by the consideration that with a package manager the barrier to installing it really low. Personally I prefer to have as

Different philosophy, partly motivated by the consideration that with a package manager the barrier to installing it really low. Personally I prefer to have as little installed as possible in the base system so that I can pick and choose what I want on top. Metapackages that install a large selection of stuff or distros that ship a ton of stuff by default drive me crazy. I don't mind it so much on a Mac as that's kind of part of the whole philosophy of OS X, but Linux (and friends) are in a different niche for me. I'm sure some desktop distros do ship xclip by default though. Knowing the typical variety of Linux distros I expect there's probably even an Xclipbuntu, dedicated solely to showing off the latest xclip release (the users of which have a decade long feud with Xseldora).