1w ago

Evince was replaced by Papers as the default Document Viewer app for the upcoming GNOME 49

gitlab.gnome.org

data: Replace org.gnome.Evince with org.gnome.Papers in Utilities (!3611) · Merge requests · GNOME / gnome-shell · GitLab

13 comments

mhm just installed Papers via Flatpak. It feels a bit more snappier than Evince; and the UI is more inline with Adwaita which is quite welcomed.
This is a better replacement than the audio player one from last time.
Evince:
Evince is a document viewer capable of displaying multiple and single page document formats like PDF and Postscript.
The gitlab repo for Evince was created May 22, 2018 and looks to be last updated yesterday.
Papers:
Papers is a document viewer capable of displaying multiple and single page document formats like PDF and DejaVu.
The gitlab repo for Papers was created March 29, 2022 and looks to be last updated 3 months ago.
I think in my years of using Gnome I've never used either, and had to search apps to see if I even had them installed. I have Evince under the fantastic title "document viewer" which is fixed in that commit yesterday. As for Papers, I don't even have it installed on 49-alpha.
- Evince is much older than 2018. I remember using it on Ubuntu 10.04. Iirc, like KDE, Gnome moved its repositories to Gitlab back in 2018.
  
  I had no doubt that it was, I guess my post was more that they have both been around for a bit doing close to the same task. So for the people pretending this is "Gnome abandoning things like they always do" I think it's kind of silly to not expect a "default" app that is more than 7+ years old to be replaced with something newer.
  Especially because these are the "default" apps that I would expect to be replaced once someone learns the DE and outgrows the defaults.
In my experience, papers has better compatibility with devices that only rely on touchscreen, have used since it launched on my tablet and it's good.
Could they stop changing stuff like this? Oh well, I gave up on GNOME years ago anyway.
- No one’s stopping you from just downloading the app you want. They changed the default, not eliminated the option to have something elsr
  
  That's true but knowing gnome they'll abandon evince development. So while you can still use evince it likely won't be maintained or bug fixed.
  
  Do I really have to have written "stop changing the defaults"? Like if Firefox kept changing its keyboard shortcuts would that be non-annoying as long as you can reset them? Oh yes, they DO that.
- Just download what you want to use? You can use the old app if you want to.
  Papers is great. If you wanted the old app to stay, maybe you should've helped maintain it and do the Libadwaita port?
  If you don't use Gnome anyway, which you decided to bring up for some reason, why do you care?
  Feels like you just want to moan about work that other people are putting a lot of effort into and providing for free.
- At least KDE is working on making their Qt apps cross-platform. Unfortunately most GNOME apps I know of receive updates for a couple years & then die off like this, and will occasionally get replaced. I think the issue partly stems from the pain points that have come with GTK+.
  
  I'm not sure if that's true. The mint team has their X-Apps project which is designed to be a cross DE GTK app initiative. Having written GTK software I also haven't found many pain points myself. Most of the problems with gnome seem to be the gnome team and not the surrounding projects.

13 comments