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Comment by approxim8ion | Hacker News Reader

Sumatra, alongside maybe Everything and IrfanView, is my favorite piece of software on windows. Incredible speed, great customizability and awesome compatibility.

I really missed it when I made the switch to Linux, but not enough to consider installing WINE. Still, absolutely wonderful project deserving of the highest praise.

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Big kudos to the author for not getting sucked into the Electron Maelstrom. I find it so interesting that fancy MVU style Elm web UI event loops etc. all just reinvent the message loop that Windows has used since Win95.

My PDF journey went from Adobe to Foxit to Firefox to SumatraPDF to Okular.

I chose Okular over SumatraPDF because it does form fills and saves said form fill data to a new PDF. (Sumatra may do form fills now, IDK)

I never would have tried Ocular if I wasn't on Fedora KDE, Sumatra was good enough, and I just fell back to FF when I had to do form fills (then print via CutePDF).

Now that Okular is just a 'choco install okular' away from having it on Windows as well as Linux, I get application consistency, form-fills that save modified PDF files, and annotation stuff.

But for Grandma? SumatraPDF it is.

> the message loop that Windows has used since Win95

I'm pretty sure Windows had a message loop since the very first version.

There is a new open source PDF viewer called sioyek that has many of the features of sumatra and has experimental linux builds.

https://sioyek.info/

(Disclaimer: I am the developer of sioyek)

What is the origin of the name? Sounds pretty hard to remember

It means 31 (thirty one) in persian.

And what connects 31 to PDFs? Just curious honestly. I also wonder why Sumatra is called that way

Replying here because I couldn't reply to your other comment (I think it reached max depth).

It has no particular relation to PDFs :D. It's just a random name. I also like the number 31.

I like the idea of the 'portal' feature. I use a wide monitor instead of two monitors, so two windows side by side is perfect for PDFs.

Paint.NET is great, too. It's not open source, unfortunately (for valid if regrettable reasons), but it's free as in free beer. The memory of its GUI makes me sigh a little whenever I open GIMP.

Have you tried Pinta? Filled the niche for me after switching to Linux.

Pinta uses an older Paint.Net code - https://github.com/PintaProject/Pinta

Apparently the author was unhappy with someone re-releasing the software while erasing the original credits (multiple times?): <https://stackoverflow.com/a/1693549>. Not sure why hiding the source code would help much, but oh well.

Pinta crashes very frequently for me, usually after 2/3 operations.

I did, and unfortunately it's usable only for extremely basic cases.

Images of a few megapixels will cause it to crash or hang on selection. Happened so many times that I am forced to use GIMP.

>(for valid if regrettable reasons)

Well now you got me curious. Why is that?

Paint.NET was open source, but a pirate would download the code, put their name over the author’s, and click build. That’s a very clear case of copyright violation, but the author decided it wasn’t worth the effort (especially if the pirate is in another country).

https://blog.getpaint.net/2007/12/04/freeware-authors-beware...

> Initially, Paint.net was released under a modified version of the MIT License, with the exclusion of the installer, text, and graphics. It was completely open-source, but because breaches of license, all resource files (such as interface text and icons) were released under a non-free Creative Commons license forbidding modification, and the installer was made closed-source. Version 3.36 was initially released as partial open-source, but Brewster later took down the source code, citing problems with plagiarism. In version 3.5, paint.net became proprietary software. Users are now prohibited from modifying it.[1]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paint.net#History

The author blogged about it in 2009 [1]

TL;DR They used a MIT licence and other people were selling broken, rebranded cashgrab copies without changing things like the installer or crash logs being sent to the author etc

[1] https://blog.getpaint.net/2009/11/06/a-new-license-for-paint...

So why isn't this a problem for other open source software? Or is it? Is it only because of the high demand for a cheaper/free Photoshop alternative?

It is.

It's more than frustrating to have crash logs that don't refer to your code and contain access tokens or similar data because the author of the 'rebranded' software doesn't care about user privacy.

I use photopea.com. It's a Photoshop clone but loads much faster and works great for when you don't need some of the newest / cutting edge PS features and don't work with large files.

How have I never tried this. Nice project.

Most amazing thing to me is that it is built and maintained by a single developer.

and that the entire program is about 2mb. Would fit on an extra high density 3.5in floppy.

https://www.photopea.com/api/accounts

The developer did an AMA. He makes a decent living off it.

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/9urjmg/i_made_a_free_...

I'd add Bvckup 2 to that list. Simply a application for copying/mirroring directories but is quick with a simple UI despite having lots of options.

Bought a license years ago but still use it daily.

Happy customer here. Bvckup2 is one of the most polished pieces of software I've ever used.

The author of Bvckup2 has a very interesting blog with articles about the ui developement:

https://bvckup2.com/wip/

There really is an abundance of high quality, and performant open-source applications on Windows. Among the three you've listed, I can also mention Notepad++, JPEGView, MPC-HC, Scoop.sh, and ShareX.

Agreed. And it's written in the native Win32 API. I personally find native Win32 apps much more usable with better UI/UX than most "modern" frameworks.

I love Sumatra too. I dislike there is no dark mode so I just used inverted colors and it has worked well. Super lightweight and simple. Unlike adobe which is bloated, slow, and annoying.

I wasn't aware of Everything - seems interesting. Are there equivalents to these that you like on Linux?

FSearch is intended to be an alternative to Everything. However it doesn't have feature parity (and probably won't ever have due to some platform limitations on Linux). Disclaimer: I'm the author of FSearch.

I also like to use fzf a lot, which is an amazing search utility (not only for finding files) for the terminal.

Catfish: https://bluesabre.org/catfish/

I use fzf on Linux for the same thing. Just stick it in an xdg-open and alias it.

As for pdfs and stuff, zathura, Okular, Calibre, or whatever ships with the distro are usually fine.

I personally like Okular a lot, I also like to use it on Windows (it's in the Windows store).

What's wrong with WINE?

Nothing wrong with it, I just think it's too much stuff to have on my system for a single program. And it introduces new kinds of vulnerabilities that I don't care for.

Not the poster but in brief using wine for your workflow implies that between version n and n+1 something may stop working potentially with a workaround or potentially forever. It's also styled funny compared to native apps.

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