It could be all change for the PDF viewer in the next version of Ubuntu.
Ubuntu’s long-time PDF viewer Evince (aka Document Viewer) is comes preinstalled in Ubuntu at present—I can’t recall using a version of Ubuntu that didn’t use it.
But next April’s release of Ubuntu 25.04 ‘Plucky Puffin’ may replace Evince with a newer document viewing app called Papers, marking a major change in the distro’s default app set.
Papers, a modern GTK4/libadwaita app, is able to ‘view, search and annotate’ documents in a wide range of formats, with PDF handling a primary focus — like Evince.
So why switch? Why is a new app needed to if it just does something similar to the current one? And why aren’t developers building a new app when they could be improving Evince instead?
The answers to all of those is surprisingly straightforward.
An Evolution of Evince
As a venerable stalwart of the free software scene, Evince is a tool lots of people use in their everyday life—from reading simple files to annotating complex research papers.
They like the way it looks, know the way it works, and used to the way it behaves.
It’s familiar.
However, the path to modernising Evince presented significant challenges.
However, modernising Evince has proven tricky. To update its appearance, add new features, and take advantage of modern technologies used in the GNOME desktop has required some major code changes – and unearthed challenges merging code back into Evince proper.
Rather than upend and overhaul Evince, forcing major changes on those happy with the existing app, devs working on Evince’s GTK4 port instead chose to fork the code, creating Papers, and continued their efforts there:
Papers has been forked from Evince, including the whole history of the evince-next branch to which the authors of the fork contributed extensively. Papers has landed the GTK4 port […] and a bunch of cleanups, modernizations and improvements to the application itself.
Papers’ Gitlab NEWS file
In some ways, that decision gives the best of both worlds: existing Evince users can continue using it—no plans to mothball or stop development—whilst GNOME can transition to a more modern document viewer better aligned to its UI and UX and technologies.
A Plucky Decision
Papers is not currently a GNOME Core app, only an Incubator project (like Showtime, which may eventually replace Totem as default media player). This means it’s not finished or finalised, and currently lacks some essential features.
But the eventual goal is to replace Evince with Papers upstream, in GNOME.
Downstream, Ubuntu feels Papers is ready for a prime position amongst its default apps. A decision taken at the fall Ubuntu Summit 2024 to preinstall Papers in 25.04.
But like a lot of documents offer, there is some small print: should early user feedback prove negative on the switch the change can be reversed before the stable release is made.
Install Papers on Ubuntu
No-one need wait until the stable Ubuntu 25.04 release rolls around to get a feel for this possible replacement as Papers is available to install from Flathub on all current versions of Ubuntu (and most other Linux distributions out there).
• Get Papers on Flathub