I’m looking for a PDF Reader that’s not going to bring in a ton of dependencies behind it. I’ve used Evince in Gnome and liked it. I’ve used Okular in KDE and liked that as well. I’d like something that loads quickly, doesn’t have to do anything special (bookmarks would be nice, though) and displays PDF’s cleanly.
Anyone have a good suggestion or two?
TIA
I’ve also been looking for lightweight PDF reader, because sometimes I have opened few software manuals with 2k pages each, so I want software to be really fast.
If you’re not looking for any sophisticated functions but truly lightweight solution then I can reccomend you:
qpdfview
I think it’s as fast as pdf reader can be, but has very limited functions other than opening PDF’s 
EDIT:
Oh, it don’t support dark mode I think, but with ctrl + i you can inverse colors, so basically all text goes white on black if you like it. I do. 
Hi @patryk. That’s exactly what I was looking for! Thanks! It installed really quickly, and launched immediately. There’s a lot of options in the preferences, too!
Thank you very much!
You can also try out Atril if you enjoyed ‘Evince’, I didn’t gave it a shot, but it may give you some extra functionality at cost of maybe some dependencies and bit more machine workload.
Hi Adam. I’m an Evince fan. Light, simple. I don’t use it for editing, just reading.
Here’s the package list to see if you think it’s too “bloated”.
Name : evince
Version : 3.32.0+26+gd3aecce7-2
Description : Document viewer (PDF, Postscript, djvu, tiff, dvi, XPS, SyncTex support with gedit, comics books (cbr,cbz,cb7 and cbt))
Architecture : x86_64
URL : https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Evince
Licenses : GPL
Groups : gnome
Provides : None
Depends On : gtk3 libgxps libspectre gsfonts poppler-glib djvulibre t1lib dconf libsecret libsynctex gsettings-desktop-schemas gnome-desktop libarchive gst-plugins-base-libs gspell
Optional Deps : texlive-bin: DVI support
gvfs: bookmark support and session saving [installed]
Required By : None
Optional For : None
Conflicts With : None
Replaces : None
Installed Size : 13.58 MiB
Packager : Jan Alexander Steffens (heftig) jan.steffens@gmail.com
Build Date : Tue 18 Jun 2019 07:52:40 AM MDT
Install Date : Mon 05 Aug 2019 04:45:05 AM MDT
Install Reason : Explicitly installed
Install Script : No
Validated By : Signature
Hi @keith. I guess what’s stopping me from installing Evince is that it includes the gnome-desktop and a bunch of other Gnomish stuff. I guess I’m just trying to keep things more simple. But, yeah…Evince is really nice! I enjoyed using it before!
Thanks!
but if you install Atril or Xreader it wants webkit2gtk , but personally intent to be webkit2gtk free 
but thats subjective
qpdfview is nice i use it too.
Yes, and it’s also part of mate desktop with heck of dependencies, so that wasn’t good recommendation.
And dont forgeth MUPDF , or Zathura-mupdf or the poppler version.
mayby not so wide spread as evince or qpdfview, but epdfviewer is also pretty light. but epdfviewer (or epdfview) cannot select a text on pdf and copy, mupdf can thats moslty what i want of a pdf viewer text selector and copy and reading a pdf file offcourse. and copy is for an account nr or something i dont need to type it over to a account.
Right now I’m just using Firefox to read pdf files. I can just drop the file into FF.
epdfview → simple - light - minimalist
My issue on epdfview, it hardly can make a selection with some text files. sometimes usefull to tag & copy to paste somewhere else. Thats why i like mupdf is also lightwight and does the copy to.
mupdf is also good, it happens that I use little of those files, for me anyone is fine.
I do use integrated reader from Firefox.
You are not installing gnome. Gnome desktop is only a few Mb, plus if using Xfce if its not installed now it will get installed a some time along the way XFCE is based on GTK3 anyway
I have been using Foxit Reader for 4 years now with Mate running on Linux only Intel NUC computer.
Hi @2jcm welcome to forum
Indeed I enjoyed my time with foxit while I was on windows, and a bit of time on linux. It’s a powerfull tool, but closed source so… You know…
And it doesn’t handle 2k pages in single pdf as good as qpdfview. And uses waaay more resources.
Why not use Adobe Acrobat Reader DC ( https://rocketfiles.com/windows/business-and-productivity/pdf-readers-and-editors/adobe-acrobat-reader-dc). As I know you can install adn run it on Linux as well as on Windows or I am wrong? It is simple to use and works with PDF files without limits.
you can always use that too when you need it offcourse, thats option is always there on users behalf
but not for adding standard to an iso offcourse, that stirs up some emotions i think