You found that you had to download too much bloat to use Okular so you made an Electron app? Im pretty sure you dont have to download all of KDE to use one of its apps, just the package manager and the libraries Okular uses.

I can't confirm if this is still the case, but a couple years ago you had a web installer for KDE on Windows and I could just deselect everything except Okular and a couple other stuff I wanted and that came out to a couple hundred MB disk space overall.

That was the windows installer for KDE 4, yes. I used to install it on every windows PC I had to use.

From a quick check now it is possible to install individual applications (Okular is not there):

https://community.kde.org/Windows

But it's not the same thing. At the times one was able to install the while kde4. That's a cross platform app!

I found this, which seems to be a build of Okular for Windows: https://chocolatey.org/packages/okular

(I haven't tested it -- happy Okular Linux user here. It was linked from the site you linked, though.)

The Electron bloat of Polar buys you much better cross-platform features than the KDE bloat of Okular.

Okular is ok as long as you run only linux. In theory you could run it also on macOS or Windows, but you have to jump through the hoops. That's not optimal for a productivity application.

What kind of cross-platform features does Electron provide that Okular does not have?

I just told you: a friggin installer. All cross-platorm features are inconsequential if you can't easily distribute the application on multiple platforms in the first place.

Here in linux land we don't give a damn about installers. We prefer to install and update all software via a single interface.

"apt install okular" requires an extra 195 packages and 194MB of space on a Ubuntu machine I have handy.

It's not all of KDE, but...

Somehow I don't find 194 MB that bad if the proposed alternative suggests a 197 MB download as "probably easiest to install", but why let details like that let an opportunity to promote your project over someone elses go to waste... If someone with a Debian box handy wants to try how much in dependencies the .deb pulls in...?

The snap package linked in GP is also ~200MB. If you're the kind of person to be frugal with your hard drive, that's cool. But I don't think an electron app is the answer.

What can you possibly object to about how it runs on linux? Its wholly reasonable that kde apps all build on the same foundation rather than each one bundle their own version of libraries.

If the entire rest of your desktop happens to be based on gnome for example you end up with *doctor evil expression" HUNDREDS OF MB of extra libraries once the first time you install a kde app. Perish the thought.

Did I say something in my comment that makes it sound like Okular doesn't run amazingly well on Linux?

I was talking about if you run it on Windows or MacOS.

> First, if you like Okular, you're stuck if you want to run on any other platform. It doesn't work on mobile, it doesn't work on the web, doesn't work on Linux, MacOS or Windows

You did directly say it doesn't run on Linux. Even with your qualification I don't think that's fair. It requires the KDE libs, yes, but that's not really a high cost apart from some disk space. Apart from that, it obviously runs perfectly well even in another desktop environment. I even use it on my Chromebook.

AH!!! ok.. definitely my fault. I meant to say it's not really cross-platform and doesn't run on all platforms.

This was a big requirement for me - the ability to move between all platforms.

I'm on GNOME, go to Gnome Software, search for Okular, click Install - boom it's installed. Since it's made available via flathub.org, Okular and the shared KDE platform libraries are installed as self-contained flatpaks. To ignorant me, looks and runs like any other application.

I can't edit my comment but I screwed up and made it sound like Okular doesn't run well on Linux.

It does! It runs great on Linux. I meant to say it's not really cross-platform.

I just re-evaluated and I can't figure out how to download Okular for Windows/MacOS.

They have a Windows + MacOS page but they don't seem to actually have downloads.

Because Okular is build with Qt5 and the KDE Framework 5, Okular is with _little_ work cross-platform. There are nightly build available for Windows: https://binary-factory.kde.org/job/Okular_Nightly_win32/ I didn't try it, but I hear the Dolphin build (https://binary-factory.kde.org/job/Dolphin_Release_win64/) work well on Windows (just the terminal part is not available).

I thought Okular was the default pdf viewer for Gnu/Linux systems with the K desktop environment?

Yeah I am super confused about that. I have been using okular for years and works on every common distro that I know of if you have KDE desktop or don't mind pulling in KDE deps.

Wow! Thanks for the self-promotion :-) Polar looks perfect for an academic environment. From a quick look the only thing missing is some kind of bibliography/doi integration.

We're working on it! We parse the DOI now and we're going to implement unpaywal DOI lookup for extended metadata. It's probably going to be a few more weeks before this is fully integrated though.

So why doesn't it work well on Linux?

Nice app. Suggestions for Polar:

- Make it so that you can /draw/ on PDFs (Okular supports this). - Create an Android app which also allows local/offline usage.

Android app is coming... drawing isn't on the short term TODO though.

Okular has a WIP mobile version for Android and Plasma mobile (with less features). The android build is broken because there isn't any icon, but running okularkirigami from the command line look great.

Also from reading the polar website, it looks like polar is more a document manager than just a document viewer.

> polar is more a document manager than just a document viewer.

It's both.. you just add the doc and double click it and you view it in polar in our PDF viewer.

"our PDF viewer" ? phone-home solutions fail

it's based on pdf.js ... which is developed on Mozilla. Both projects are open source. It's also free ;)