Earlier this year Ubuntu announced plans to replace document viewer app Evince with Papers, a modern GTK4/libadwaita fork1 of the former, in Ubuntu 25.04—today, the swap was made official.

Papers is a fork of Evince that is actively maintained and makes use of newer technologies (GTK4, THIS), that are already present in Ubuntu. Upstream, GNOME 48 (out in March) opts to keep Evince as a core app but GNOME 49 is expected to switch to Papers.

Ubuntu feels no reason to wait.

Evince and Papers document viewers side by side
Evince and Papers: shared lineage, different directions

Dabbled with daily builds of the Plucky Puffin prior to now?

You might have noticed Papers isn’t present on the ISO or actual installs. This is because ‘paperwork’ was needed first: packaging Papers in Debian, syncing it to plucky‘s universe repo, filing a main inclusion request (MIR) to move to main, and passing security review.

Hurdles cleared, today saw Plucky’s ubuntu-meta file (currently in -proposed) updated to finally commit to the swap, with Evince removed and Papers added, meaning the app will now start propagating out for wider testing.

Not that it’s a done dusted implementation yet; there’s further work to be done.

Ubuntu devs need to patch GTK3 to let GTK3 apps use Papers for print previews (as Evince currently does), and the .desktop file needs to be updated to label Papers as Document Viewer in the app picker, adhering to GNOME apps’ agnostic name conventions.

App swaps (like major updates) are often fraught given most folks tend to like the app they know. The upside is there is no major regression in user experience since it continues to do its primary purpose: open and display PDFs.

It’s not a clone; there are missing features that, in time, will be (re)added. Since Papers is a fork, those who want (or need) to use Evince in Ubuntu 25.04 can install it from the repos in a couple of clicks /apt command—and yes: it can be installed alongside its usurper!

So yeah — something to look out for when Plucky Puffin lands next month (April), while users on earlier versions of Ubuntu can install Papers from Flathub.

  1. Why a fork and not a direct continuation? My original post covers the reasons why. Tl;dr: Evince‘s codebase is crusty (hence its general lack of maintenance) and lot of people prefer the app as it is. Why expend effort to force major changes if a fork is easier and allows devs to scorch-earth without fear of an end-user scalding! ↩︎