Going Minty 3 - Solving why Gimp is opening PDFs on Chromium

Something I did not encounter on Mageia but cropped up in Linux Mint is something quite strange. It's strange because it also seems counter intuitive. Especially for a distribution that does so well in keeping things user-friendly. The odd thing that happened to me in Linux Mint was that Chromium opens PDF with Gimp.

GIMP 2.2.8  graphic software. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Now this is not too bad if you have a good PC. And it's not wrong either because Gimp can open PDFs and better still, edit them. But you want to open a multi-page PDF, Gimp will render each page up-front. Meaning that if the PDFs has a lot of pages, it's gonna take some time. If your rig has less than 1 GB of RAM, the wait becomes worse.
The solution is obvious: change the default setting or program for opening PDFs. Unfortunately, that didn't work for me. Set what ever it is, the default is set to Gimp. I do get a choice to switch to another program each time, but it tends to get annoying. So how does one change the default application. Apparently there is common program called xdg  that helps with opening of files. Applications under freedesktop.org call on xdg to help them open document files. So for Chromimun, after it downloads a PDF file, it calls on xdg to open it. xdg determines the actual viewer and passes the name of the PDF to the viewer for it to open. The definition for the 'actual viewer' is either set by the underlying environment (KDE, GNOME, etc) or by xdg itself. The command is as follows:

Away and back

There is no way else to say it. I haven't posted much in the past few months. Simply put, work overtook free time. In fact, work overtook everything else. So much so, I had to come to a decision, choose work or everything else.
Don't get me wrong. I loved working with the people I've been working with the last few months. They were, and still are, some of the smartest, most positive people I've worked with. Whatever came our way, we took on the problems and dealt with them the best way we could, with whatever we had. We played with the hand we were dealt with, no excuses. Inclusion was a big theme. Information was shared freely and bullshit was called out without shaming and without shame. Getting things done was the song of the day and it drowned everything else.

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

But it came with heavy costs. Free Time fell first. Health came next. I'm sure Sanity would have been the next casualty. It's a big problem for me because I've seen how lives and families were lost when work took over everything. I could learn from lessons past or forge ahead.
So I made the decision. I value my life and my family more than work. Work is money but having gained hindsight the others, I've saved some just for a rainy day like this. Money can always be earned elsewhere. But love is life. And I love my life.
I have a ton of posts in draft so expect to see more in the next weeks. Thanks for sticking around.