Linux - where does all that mount rage come from?

According to the ArchLinux wiki xdg-open does use MIME types:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Xdg-open

There is, as far as I can find, *no* documentation to speak of on xdg-open ... But I peeked at the source, and it does seem that it's using MIME data (using xdg-mime)

Also can't find Lennart Poettering's name anywhere in the xdg-utils package (README, ChangeLog, etc.)
 
Poettering's (http://poettering.de/) website is funny.

Code:
HTTP header:
Content-Type: text/html; charset: utf-8

Page source:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-15"?>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/xhtml; charset=iso-8859-15"/>
Two different character sets and two different MIME types for the page (one of which is invalid, there is no such thing "text/xhtml").

The document is in ISO-8859-15 by the way, but displays incorrectly because my browser assumes UTF-8 (HTTP header has precedence), *not* using UTF-8 in 2012 is something of a fail on itself IMHO.

The page also uses a table layout. Yikes! 1995 flashback!

Also note how he uses "proper" quotation marks (“ ” instead of " ") but in the wrong order :)

It's also not clear this actually is a quote by Einstein, it's wildly reported to be, but I can't find the context where it's said. Someone at wikiquotes did some more research, and it's doubtful at best that Einstein said this ...

The photo is nice though. :) Too bad it's being served from a different domain (== more useless DNS requests) and that the URL has spaces in it (yak!)

... I know the guy isn't a web dev, but still ... It does show the complete lack of attention to detail and "let's just slap something together"-attitude that's so prevalent in much of the software these people churn out.
 
Well, kind of off topic but not. I'm really tired of the slap-together attitude of linux and software in general. Whatever happened to rock solid, known consequence programming? From what I can tell FreeBSD suffers mostly from hardware support. Am I missing something here? The only thing that keeps me away from FreeBSD as a desktop at all is the lack of hardware drivers for video. That's it, I still have it installed and still use it on a daily basis. Though when I have to do work related otherwise, I have to switch. Is there any part of the community that's even remotely interested in this?
 
As a former hardware engineer, I sometimes get the itch to make open source boards and drivers but I understand creating something would take quite a while. Especially when I'd have to remember how all that stuff worked.
 
I've thought about it as well, and stopped because of exactly the time issue. Just seems that it's seriously going to take an active effort to gain in this area. Is anyone even remotely interested in going down this vein besides me? I could see a few ways to make a good solid change in the way video and associated drivers are handled that would be a solid win for everyone. I'm not asking for overnight change, but I am wondering if anyone would like to jump in and help on this kind of project.
 
xdg-open is a script that seems to do the following. It looks at the desktop environment and checks if it is KDE, Gnome or Xfce. It starts the application with the file managers that are well known there.

If none of the three above is your desktop environment ... it looks at the environment variable BROWSER, if it is set, it starts the URI/file with the application specified there. If BROWSER is not set, it starts firefox.

What's the point of this stupid behavior?
 
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