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Okular vs Zathura
October 06, 2024 | Author: Adam Levine
9★
The Universal Document Viewer. Multi-platform, fast and packed with features, Okular allows you to read PDF documents, comics and EPub books, browse images, visualize Markdown documents, and much more.
7★
Zathura is a free, plugin-based document viewer. Plugins are available for PDF, PostScript and DjVu. It was written to be lightweight and controlled with vi-like keybindings. Zathura's customizability makes it well-liked by many Linux users
See also:
Top 10 PDF Readers for Business
Top 10 PDF Readers for Business
In the vast and mildly bewildering universe of Linux document viewers, two species have emerged from the cosmic soup: Okular and Zathura. Now, if you’re the sort of person who enjoys a comfortable interface, a healthy dose of icons, buttons and the occasional pop-up that does something useful, Okular is probably your cup of tea. Born in the KDE nebula, Okular comes packed with enough features to make a Swiss Army knife blush—handling PDFs, eBooks and anything else you care to throw at it, provided you’re not still using a machine powered by a crankshaft.
Zathura, however, hails from a minimalist dimension where things are done with precision, simplicity and an utter disdain for unnecessary frippery. Designed for the GTK desktop, Zathura is sleek, fast and about as no-nonsense as a document viewer can get. Its interface is so minimalist it’s practically Zen, offering users the ability to view documents without the distraction of—well, anything else. If Okular is the busy multitasker, juggling plugins and annotations, Zathura is the calm monk who doesn’t even own juggling balls.
The difference, of course, extends to how these two handle the vast and mysterious energy fields of system resources. Okular, with all its delightful frills and doodads, is a bit of a resource hog. It’s the sort of application that will hum along merrily on modern machines but might cause older systems to break into a wheezing fit. Zathura, on the other hand, sips resources so daintily that you could probably run it on a toaster, making it the viewer of choice for those who want speed, efficiency and the comforting knowledge that their document viewer is not plotting to devour their CPU in its spare time.
See also: Top 10 PDF Readers
Zathura, however, hails from a minimalist dimension where things are done with precision, simplicity and an utter disdain for unnecessary frippery. Designed for the GTK desktop, Zathura is sleek, fast and about as no-nonsense as a document viewer can get. Its interface is so minimalist it’s practically Zen, offering users the ability to view documents without the distraction of—well, anything else. If Okular is the busy multitasker, juggling plugins and annotations, Zathura is the calm monk who doesn’t even own juggling balls.
The difference, of course, extends to how these two handle the vast and mysterious energy fields of system resources. Okular, with all its delightful frills and doodads, is a bit of a resource hog. It’s the sort of application that will hum along merrily on modern machines but might cause older systems to break into a wheezing fit. Zathura, on the other hand, sips resources so daintily that you could probably run it on a toaster, making it the viewer of choice for those who want speed, efficiency and the comforting knowledge that their document viewer is not plotting to devour their CPU in its spare time.
See also: Top 10 PDF Readers
