Inkscape. And tell her that's not how pdf works; she relies on a hack.
this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2026
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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.
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.
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:
stop editing pdfs, that's like scrapbooking. put the stuff into a mutable format and generate a pdf when you're done.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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 :(