I Hate Acrobat
16 comments
·October 15, 2025mananaysiempre
zamadatix
I had to ctrl+f the blogpost after reading because I couldn't believe they ended it without even a mention of SumatraPDF!
What a great PDF reader. kjksf, thank you!
clickety_clack
Acrobat is the worst. I had to download it to fill in tax forms and suddenly every pdf download triggers a lumbering beast to wake itself up and wrench control of my desktop. It has the feel of scammy shareware from back in the day.
gdulli
Firefox has never failed me for this. It's great not needing a separate program at all.
porphyra
In my experience, the best tool to edit PDFs is Master PDF Editor. The older version 4 is even freely available in the arch user repository: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/masterpdfeditor-free
nipperkinfeet
We all do. There are many amazing alternatives nowadays. No need for any Adobe products.
karsa_orlong
I recommend sioyek if you need some highlighting functionality which is absent in zathura. Moreover, Xournal++ is also pretty good for editing.
What I really want is a PDF editor, with just highlighting functionality, that works like the visual mode.
asdff
How about the fact they charge $25/mo for acrobat
gdevenyi
No mention of Okular from KDE.
Scene_Cast2
Running X11 on WSL is pretty easy and pain-free these days. The author could hypothetically run Zathura through that setup in a pinch.
I'm all for a good Acrobat alternative though.
elorant
I hate pretty much everything from Adobe. I treat all their software as malware since it's counter intuitive and consumes too much resources. Thank God i'm not an artist/design who has to work with their products daily.
Gualdrapo
And even if you were you could manage to earn a living without using Adobe stuff. Ask David Revoy, for example.
annoyingnoob
Adobe is trash, bloated, over-priced software that is mostly DRM. Paying customer? Adobe hates you, but not your money.
munk-a
Like a lot of enterprise software companies - their customers aren't their end users so a lot of their incentives aren't actually aligned to produce a good UX.
adamnemecek
What I hate about Preview on macOS is that all opened PDFs are kept in memory as opposed to freeing up the memory when the PDF is not active.
Look I know that I probably should not have 200 PDFs open, but Preview should not be consuming 40GB of memory.
243524352435
[dead]
No mention of Sumatra PDF[1]? Windows (only), open source, uses MuPDF.
[1] https://www.sumatrapdfreader.org/