What you observes could be OS depended,. Vim has its own copy paste buffers (y,p etc) and the OS has its own. Traditionally highligh to copy and middle mouse button to paste on Unix. Windows has 2 methods, ctrl-c,v but those are also bindings in vim so only the older less known crtl-insert,shirt-insert works.
Copy paste is definitely built in, there is no need for extra plugins.
You mean you couldn’t copy some text from vim and paste it into another application? if yes, what did you have to install/configure for that? I’ve never had any issues copy paste from/to vim, console/GUI windows/Unix.
1 FreeBSD server with zfs mirror for storage and various server software
1 FreeBSD laptop for development
1 Linux laptop for software that doesn’t support FreeBSD
1 Linux desktop for work.
The rest of the family is 100% windows though :/
I went from using slackware late 90s early 00 to Mac OSX in early/mid 00. When coming back to Linux late 00 early 10s I was so disappointed in the Linux distros. I tried Ubuntu but was very disappointed in the lack of newer versions of third party software in their repo. Tried Arch for a while and while packages were up to date, every now and then the OS updates would mess something up and I had to start troubleshooting.
It might be better now, but I eventually gave up and went to FreeBSD about 10 years ago. Stable base and separate up to date third party feels like the best of both worlds. Not sure if any llinux distro offers something like that now. No snap, no flatpack, just a base os and up to third party date packages.