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I'm writing a C++ program in which I want to open the user's default browser. For Linux, I found that I can use the xdg-open command. However, is xdg-open available on all Linux distributions by default?

Is there a better alternative?

xdg-open is part of the freedesktop.org suite and is, as far as I know, available to any reasonably generic desktop distribution.

That being said, you can't count on it being available on Android (though that runs a Linux kernel, and thus is a Linux), on something that just displays things on a framebuffer (older navigation systems / HMIs), something that comes without a desktop manager (some kiosk type devices) and of course extremely slimmed down things.

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