PDF Reader for Linux: What to Use Instead of Adobe Acrobat

There is no current Adobe Acrobat Reader for Linux. Adobe stopped shipping one more than a decade ago, and the old package that still floats around forums is long unmaintained — do not install it.

The good news is that the replacements are genuinely fine. Which one you want depends entirely on what you do with PDFs, so here they are grouped by that rather than by popularity.

If you only need to read

Evince (called Document Viewer on GNOME) is already installed on Ubuntu and most GNOME desktops. It opens quickly, it prints correctly, and for reading a report or a manual there is nothing wrong with it. If that is your whole use case, stop here — you already have what you need.

Your browser also works. Firefox and Chrome both render PDFs perfectly well, and for a file someone emailed you it is often the fastest route.

If you need to annotate and review

Okular is the strongest free annotation tool on Linux. Highlights, notes, shapes, stamps, and a proper review sidebar. It comes from the KDE project but installs and runs fine on GNOME:

sudo apt install okular

The trade-off is that Okular pulls in a set of KDE libraries, which on a GNOME system means a larger install than you might expect. That is a disk-space objection, not a functional one.

If you work with large drawings

This is where the default choices start to struggle, and it is the reason TorReader PDF has a Linux build at all.

A drawing set exported from AutoCAD or Revit is not a big file because of images — it is big because of the sheer number of vector operations on each sheet. Readers built for documents load the whole file into memory first and redraw everything on each zoom, which is why an A0 sheet can feel unresponsive even on a fast machine.

TorReader PDF uses memory-mapped loading, so a 900MB file opens in one to two seconds without being copied into RAM, and continuous scroll releases pages once they leave the screen so a 300-sheet set stays light. Version 2.3 added GPU vector rendering, which keeps lines crisp while you zoom and pan instead of showing you a blurred bitmap until the redraw catches up.

If you need to merge, split or extract pages

Two routes, and they suit different people.

Command line. qpdf and pdftk are excellent if you are comfortable in a terminal and doing the same operation repeatedly. Nothing beats a one-line command in a script.

Graphical. If you are picking pages by eye — which is what most people are actually doing — TorReader PDF handles merge, insert, extract and split with bookmarks preserved and remapped to the right pages, which the command-line tools will not do for you without effort.

Installing TorReader PDF on Ubuntu

Three ways. The APT repository is the one to choose, because it means updates arrive with the rest of your system rather than needing to be fetched by hand.

sudo mkdir -p /etc/apt/keyrings
sudo curl -fsSL https://torreader.cloud/apt/torreader-archive-keyring.gpg -o /etc/apt/keyrings/torreader.gpg
echo "deb [signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/torreader.gpg] https://torreader.cloud/apt stable main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/torreader.list
sudo apt update && sudo apt install torreader

There is also a .deb package for a one-off install, and an AppImage if you want no installation at all — download it, make it executable, run it. Full instructions, including which Ubuntu versions are supported, are on the Linux install page.

What does not work on Linux

Worth saying plainly rather than letting you find out.

• Digital signing with a .pfx or .p12 certificate is Windows-only in TorReader PDF at the moment. If signing is your reason for reading this, the Linux build will not do it yet.
• Adobe's own ecosystem features — cloud sync, Acrobat forms with JavaScript, Adobe Sign workflows — have no Linux equivalent from anyone. If a client's process depends on them, you need a Windows machine or a browser.
• Anything relying on the old Adobe Reader 9 for Linux. It has not had a security update in many years. Do not run it on a machine that opens files from other people.

Short version

• Reading a document → Evince, already installed.
• Reviewing and annotating → Okular.
• Large drawings, merging, splitting, page extraction → TorReader PDF.
• Scripted batch work → qpdf on the command line.
• Signing with a certificate → not on Linux yet, in any of these.