Never heard of this “Papers” PDF reader before and it’s not on Flathub either. Apparently it is a fork of Evince with lots of big changes planned. Exciting stuff! But does anyone know what’s going to happen to Evince?
Yeah, Papers doesn’t have a stable release yet since they are still doing big design changes, but you can get it through the GNOME Nightly repo. I’ve been using it for quite a while now!
I think evince will be eventually dropped by GNOME but there is time for that. While papers is porting things to GTK4 and adding some great features, it still has a long way to go in performance and optimisation. Currently it is more than twice as slow to open a pdf when compared to evince. Also scrolling performance is not optimised as it will stop mid scroll for things to render. Well it is only a new project so hopefully all this will be fixed. I am still using papers so that I can report any bugs that I run into