About a year back I was tasked with porting an installer for a proprietary product to work on Linux. I wanted to show the log files to the user in the graphical installer and I ended up using xdg-open, which as it turns out opens text files in Firefox, even though light weight editors are present on the system.<p>I also found that some scripts had the hashbang line as &#x2F;bin&#x2F;env which works on RHEL, but not on SuSE.<p>I have also been trying to write some scripts that work across multiple distros. Detecting distros is wierd. &quot;lsb-release&quot; is not present in most distros. &quot;&#x2F;etc&#x2F;issue.net&quot; is present in some, but not on ArchLinux.<p>No wonder ISVs find it hard to support Linux. I suspect the technical side of this problem is probably trivial, the leadership side, not so much.