At work CentOS 6 is the standard Linux distribution and I’ve become accustomed to using the default desktop’s help system to view man pages. This is actually Yelp, the GNOME help viewer, which in CentOS 6’s GNOME 2 based desktop is available by default in one of the menus.
At home however I’m currently using Fedora 18 with the Mate desktop, which doesn’t provide a similar setup, even though Yelp is used by several applications. A bigger problem, however, is the fact that once you do start Yelp there’s no evident way to get it to display man pages, even though it works from the command line, as in
yelp man:cat
This would not be very useful when Yelp is configured to run from one of the MATE menus. After some googling I found out from this forum thread that this is a known bug and that an undocumented workaround is to type Control-L in the navigation bar. After that man pages can be found with the same syntax as the one displayed above, i.e.
man:bash
What the hell, what do I know? 