stop editing pdfs, that's like scrapbooking. put the stuff into a mutable format and generate a pdf when you're done.
this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2026
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Easier said than done.
Slightly OT, but PDF Xchange Editor works great under wine, and tbh I think it's miles ahead of Acrobat in terms of features.
I agree it's great but I had issues running it under Wine. An alternative is Xodo for Linux which apparently is Qoppa PDF Studio revamped. These three look strangely very similar. But Xodo has other issues, including crashes.
Yes. She has been doing this for a very long time. I hope you see changing not only the full OS, but her entire workflow...might be too much of a PITA and she'll just go back to the old Mac. Which I was trying to avoid.
oh i know, it's part of painfully many workflows. i don't understand how it got started and i cringe every time i hear someone is doing it. i'm not suggesting this seriously obviously.
she'll just go back to the old Mac
Let her? Why are you controlling what OS she runs? She had a working setup she liked.
they're not controlling her, they're trying to provide an alternative that she'll stick with
She's starting to get fed-up with some Apple choices. I offered an alternative. That is now worse than the original. And I was trying to sort it out. But I guess your solution is "just don't try".
Off topic but isnt KDE Neon a test distro? if I recall its maintained by 1 guy and its purpose was a KDE demo environment. How do people end up putting new users on these obscure alpha distros.
I'm happy to consider good KDE alternatives. I used Nobara and Fedora before coming back to Neon. Nobara started failing after a couple of years and made me consider a reinstall. Switched to Fedora, and I had issues trying to get winapps working....And some other quirk I don't remember. So I came back to the demo that didn't fail me in years of use.
If it works for you then dont worry about it. I run nobara and its had a few issues but nothing i cant fix and its been mostly stable for 4 years. Fedora has been rock solid for 4 years on my laptop and I consider it to be the best in class linux and KDE experience. Its the only distro i recommend.
Inkscape. And tell her that's not how pdf works; she relies on a hack.
In this thread: "stop wanting to do what you want to do".
honestly this is why Linux desktop isn't viable short term.
The one thing holding me back from switching from Windows to Linux was the very poor PDF support in Linux. Every time I raised this several people told me I use PDF wrong. Others would tell me to use Inkscape, Draw, Okular etc.
Office workers, publishers, academics and many more are expected to edit several PDFs every day. It may be simply crossing things out in a draft, adding/deleting/extracting/converting pages, OCRing or dewarping images. Telling colleagues, clients and line managers they shouldn't do it is not an option. Adobe does all this and more very well. This workflow is so common and important in so many contexts, I am surprised it's not a separate application in the LibreOffice suite. What is more surprising is some of the attitudes.
I have now switched to Linux anyway, but I had to create scripts to do things with Ghostscript. Not very user-friendly and I wouldn't recommend Linux to people who rely heavily on PDF handling.
May I suggest Master PDF Editor? It's proprietary, and I think you may need to pay for some of the features, but I've used it for years and have generally been pretty happy with it. An open source alternative that I'm not as familiar with is PDF4QT, which is still a bit rough around the edges last time I checked.
As far as Wine goes, I have never gotten it to work with any Adobe product, ever, period. If you really need to use Adobe stuff, I suggest using it from a Virtual Machine with Windows.
I stopped recommending Master PDF Editor when I realised they were trying to lock me in with letting me know after the event that watermarks would be added.
PDF4QT is aekward in many ways but the latest version has the best compression, even allowing you to select one-by-one which images will be compressed and how.
Other options for editing are local Stirling PDF and BentoPDF. Both run in docker, but Stirling PDF also comes as Appimage. They are powerful but don't feel like integrated applications.
To everyone in the thread going "ugghhhh this isn't what PDF is intended for!!!!!1!!1!!!"
Please stop. We know. We all know. It's irrelevant to this conversation.
In an ideal world, PDF would be an output only format. Meanwhile, I have to manually apply text to PDFs and paste my signature as an image to file both my Canadian and Quebec taxes. Reality doesn't care about technical perfection and is run by a bunch of senile luddites.
A PDF editor is basically a requirement for anyone who files their own taxes here, and it's a requirement for many, many industries, where they may need to doctor a document whose source is long gone to the winds of time.
To answer your question:
- Foxit (wine)
- Qoppa PDF Studio (native)
- An older version of Acrobat Pro (Wine)
GNOME's papers now supports basic file editing, but no image pasting, which may be required for """signing""" documents (how is this even legally binding? anyway).
I use Adobe Acrobat professionally. I am also on Linux as a daily driver.
Bad news, it's very very difficult.
If your gf's use case involves sharing PDFs with other people at scale, there just isn't a "low tech" solution. Every workaround I use involves some level of programmatic nonsense. For reading and relatively simple tasks, many of the open source alternatives do wonders, but they aren't able to replicate some of the heavier features. Even when they are, you loose compatibility; something critical in certain workflows.
I am stubborn. I force my gimp files upon my Photoshop using colleagues. I edit videos in Blender instead of Premiere Pro (would recommend). I send open source documents and spreadsheets that work neither with my Google nor Microsoft devoted co-workers. But Adobe Acrobat wins. The FOSS readers are probably better, but for interactive, highly formatted outputs you can't get around it.
I have a lonely second box at my work that I reluctantly boot windows on. I too would love an alternative.
Same situation here. For heavier editing I now use local Stirling PDF and BentoPDF. As I say above, both run in docker, but Stirling PDF also comes as Appimage. They are powerful but don't feel like integrated applications.
But there is a surprising gap in Linux for PDF editing. Available tools are like toys for the task or geared towards techies. I would expect a PDF reader/editor to be a separate application in the LibreOffice suite. (No, Draw or Inkscape won't cut it, sorry)
May I ask why she's moving away from Mac? And also what problems are you having with bottles?
As for the alternatives, OnlyOffice is really good at editing PDF files. It treats them like their own office format, on the same level as docx and ppt
Well she found a Chuwi Mini X laptop and found it irresistibly cute. It's a tiny 10" laptop. Comes with W11 by default, but was sluggish as hell so i removed it immediately. Much snappier on Linux.
Thanks I'll try Onlyoffice. I think it messes the formatting on some more complex pdfs but let's see.
If you really have to use Adobe Acrobat Reader, it works fine in CrossOver, which is paid but it supports the wine developers.
Also if it helps with getting it working in Wine, these are the installers that CrossOver uses:
sounds like she needs to switch applications before switching oses.
switching to linux gets much much easier when you get used to the foss apps first.
acrobat might run fine on wine but there are other editors that are better in every way and not dependent on wine or adobe.
Another program you can try that no one has mentioned yet is Scribus. You will need at least version 1.5 to be able to open PDFs properly. Be aware that it is a desktop publishing program (analogous to InDesign if you're looking at the Adobe family), so there are likely to be differences in the workflow.
(The method of absolute desperation is, of course, to install a Windows VM just to support that one program while you wait for the RFEs you filed against the piece of software that's closest to being useful for her to be dealt with.)
Sorry to be that guy but... why? The whole motivation behind PDF is precisely NOT to be edited, NOT to be responsive, but rather to provide the SAME output, mostly text based, anywhere and everywhere.
I'm not saying she shouldn't edit PDF but I also have to clarify it is not "normal'.
I'll refrain from recommending anything before actually understanding the motivation behind her workflow.
Take a look at Xournal++, it's not precisely the same workflow but if "scrapbooking" is what she's looking for then it's quite good for that
LibreOffice Draw is a decent alternative IMO
It's gonna break bookmarks, if this is not important then yes, Draw could work for relatively simple edits. Depends a lot on the file itself.
Yeah...I think she tried, and it messed some of the PDFs she was working on :(