Linux desktop environments

A difficulty I have with the desktop environments so pervading the mainstream Linux community is attempting to use some of their components outside those environments. For example, one has to recall that software is associated with KDE or whatever to guess which keystrokes may work for it. I am rarely sufficiently aware of the underlying toolkit.

I have had some success, though, thanks to the configurability offered by applications. For example, the file selection dialogs (for save as and similar) in Firefox and LibreOffice were wholly unusable for me. Fortunately, in LibreOffice I find that the Use LibreOffice dialogs option fixes the issue, and with some prompt help from Mozilla's Firefox Support Forum I now find that its ui.allow_platform_file_picker = false option is equivalently helpful. I wonder if the problem is that GTK3 is expecting more of my desktop environment (currently twm!) than it offers.

Update: Following their usual pattern, Mozilla has since removed that useful configuration option.