Okular update for Debian
Update 20200304: okular is updated in Debian, so I rebased my packages onto the Debian work, added my tab-restore patch, and made new packages!
The quest for a good tabbed pdf viewer lead me okular. While Gnome3 has gone they way of “keep it stupid keep it simple” to appeal to less versed users, KDE has gone the opposite direction and provides lots of bells and knobs to configure their application. Not surprisingly, I am tending more and more to KDE apps away from the redux stuff of Gnome apps.
Unfortunately, okular in Debian is horrible outdated. The version shipped in unstable is 17.12.2, there is a version 18.04 in experimental, and the latest from upstream git is 19.12.2. Fortunately, and thanks to the Debian maintainers, the packaging of the version in experimental can be adjusted without too much pain to the latest version, see this git repo.
You can find the sources and amd64 packages in my Debian repository:
deb https://www.preining.info/debian unstable main
deb-src https://www.preining.info/debian unstable main
Enjoy.
The debian version numbers of okular appear to be multiplied by 10. Any reason for deviating from upstream?
Upstream uses these tags (19.12.2) so that are the “releases”. But it is true, they mention other versions in the text. Something upstream needs to sort out. I guess it is due to KDE release naming.
Something I don’t understand about Evince and GNOME-y friends is why the menu-less version doesn’t respond to standard buttons like Alt for the menu anymore. You can only control the program by keyboard if you read up on and learn the keyboard shortcuts. It seems you need to be either a “click everything” kind of user or an advanced expert in the program.
That is what Gnome’s UI designer has found out from their experiments – I am just not sure with what kind of life form they did the experiments 😉
You could have installed it from Flathub:
https://flathub.org/apps/details/org.kde.okular
I tried the snap store, there are new packages, but that didn’t work on Debian/sid, simply crash dumped and nothing more. I prefer native apps without the snap/flatpak/etc stuff around.
flatpak is not the same thing as snap.
Ok, I will take another look. Still, having “native” (in the sense of all libraries are used from the system) is preferably to me. Still, I will check out flatpak. Thanks
Ok, I tried it. It installed, it runs. Fine. But …. it ignores the selected theme, and above all, wait du -sh /var/lib/flatpak … 1.7G … are you joking? It even tried to install nvidia drivers locally.
I think this is the prime and all encompassing error of all of these “app stores”: huge waste, huge duplication, no integration.
I have to say, I prefer my own compiled okular much more!