On Sat, Mar 1, 2025 at 2:26 AM Frederic Peters <fpet...@debian.org> wrote: > I did not investigate further as I had no time for it and it was just > simpler to switch back to evince. Looking at it now, with the same > simple PDF, Papers consume ~4 times the memory Evince consume.
Yes, Papers uses more memory than most other apps I am running now other than web browsers or Electron apps. I believe this is true for any Rust app, so this issue also applies to Loupe which we now use by default instead of eog. I think this is because Rust apps are currently compiled statically in Debian instead of using shared libraries like C apps. I don't think this will change a few months from now and might not change before we release Forky. My opinion is that I wouldn't block switching because of this issue. It is still possible to install Evince for people who have the need to open many PDF files simultaneously. Firefox (and most web browsers) can also open PDFs natively; although I guess that wouldn't help for conserving memory. A few other things I've learned since starting this conversation: - RHEL 10 Beta and similar distros have already switched from evince to papers. RHEL 10 Beta is generally shipping GNOME 47 so this is arguably even more aggressive than Debian switching. - Based in part on Ubuntu and Debian's actions, the developers of Fedora Workstation 42 (to be released approximately in May with GNOME 48) are considering switching to Papers also. - Once Papers is accepted into GNOME Core, the display name will change to "Document Viewer" like was done for Evince. I'd like to include that string in Papers 48.0 upstream so that it can be translated early and we may then include a patch to update the .desktop file with the more permanent name. - Maybe we would then change Evince's .desktop to "Evince" which is already translated. This would help users differentiate the apps. - We also include gnome-sushi in the default install which currently still uses GTK3. This means we would keep the Evince libraries installed but not the Evince app. I think a reasonable deadline to make these kinds of default app swaps is the Transition Freeze so I'd like to wrap up this conversation by the end of this weekend and make a decision by late Sunday or early Monday. Thank you, Jeremy Bícha
