When Ubuntu 25.04 made Papers its default PDF viewer in place of Evince, it did so knowing knowing upstream GNOME planned to make the same switch — now it has.
The GNOME 49 Alpha release will ship Papers as a GNOME Core App, replacing Evince (also, as I reported back in May, Totem is replaced by Showtime in GNOME 49, and Manuals replaces Devhelp in the core-devel-tools set).
For app swaps in GNOME development releases, they must be made them before the first alpha. The nature of development means decisions get made early but tentatively. If testing throws up issues which can’t be worked through in time, revert is possible.
If the testing of Papers goes well during the alpha, the stable GNOME 49 release will include Papers as a Core App. Though Linux distributions aren’t required to preinstall all Core Apps, a document viewer is an essential tool so most will.
Ubuntu already uses Papers so whatever happens in GNOME 49, Ubuntu 25.10 will offer it.
But with more attention on Papers upstream, any gloss, polish and improvements the app receives will benefit downstream users — and there are already some great improvements waiting.
New Features in Papers
Papers (which will be called Document Viewer within GNOME now it’s a Core App, the same way Nautilus is Files, Snapshot is Camera, Decibels is Audio Player, etc) is under active development and continuing to improve. It’s not merely a GTK4/libadwaita Evince port.
Beyond studious code cleanups, foundational changes (more Rust, naturally), and usability tweaks (better support for fractional scaling, spell checking), the latest nightly builds of Papers boast an improved UI for creating and editing annotations.
Work to fill in gaps in accessibility (like screen reader support for documents) is in progress, with code ready to be merged.
Printing is reportedly a bit iffy, but that’s not exclusive to Papers but remains a (somewhat mythical) bugbear of GTK4 apps in general.
For Ubuntu users who work with PDFs a lot, those changes above are worth looking out for when Ubuntu 25.10 is released in October — or if the swap sticks, another Linux distribution offering GNOME 49!