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'open' is on of the things I long for most as a Linux user. There are several ways to achieve something that are all inferior or downright broken. Usually you don't have a huge problem, until you have. xdg-open for example could've solved this, if it was universally working.

I wrote related rant once[0] when I tried to debug an issue of a misconfigured default browser.

[0]: http://f5n.org/blog/2013/default-browser-linux/

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xdg-open works for me with the GNOME-configured default application.

While xdg-open also works well for me with KDE's default applications, when I used to use Openbox or LXDE, it was much less successful. The breadth of the group of tools that respond correctly to KDE settings as opposed to the less-common environments has been one of the reasons I've been so happy to switch.

Also works great in XFCE, in my experience.

The fish shell [1] gives you an open command on Linux. Really it's just a function that calls cygstart, xdg-open, or mimedb.

It's incredibly handy.

1: http://fishshell.com

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