I “just” wanted to open latex help, so I bookmarked file:///usr/share/doc/tetex-doc/index.html. I noticed that there are some dead links (bug pending), but more importantly, most of the pdfs are compressed with gzip, and on my disk as 'manual.pdf.gz'. How to view them?

The tetex maintainer answers this in 289096. Short: Fix your viewers to uncompress them. pdf compression just sucks, gzip is way better. As a workaround, Frank suggests using texdoc, a small utility for opening tetex package documentation by using see(1).

Okay, how to teach galeon then how to uncompress these silly .pdf.gz files? Short googling found Erich Schubert already ranting about this: http://blog.drinsama.de/erich/en/linux/2005100101-gnome-upstream-can-be-ignorant.html

In the end: Gnome developers see this issue blocked by freedesktop.org. They need to define a mime type for this (wtf?!): https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4658

~~DISCUSSION~~