Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKyPu2-TdCs

This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/fedora by /u/DoesntWorkOnMyMachin on 2026-07-30 20:06:49+00:00.

I had some trouble filling out a PDF on Linux and it irked me so much that I decided to try out everything and document the impossibility of filling out this PDF on Linux to prove to myself and others that I am not crazy.

I prefer blog posts to videos but in this instance I felt that it made more sense to show the entire process than have a wall of text riddled with GIFs.

But the video is long, so I've put timestamps in the description and here is a short summary (that cannot replace the experience of watching the entire thing):

• Okular << Evince < Chromium < Firefox.
• None of them can do everything, there are bugs but also missing features (not all can add images for example).
• LibreOffice Draw does not work as it rearranges parts of the PDF.
• Xournal++ works great if you still want to consider that PDF editing.
• (I think Inkscape would work as well but that would require some pain tolerance on the side of the user)
• Are you bored? Why not
  • work towards fixing some of these bugs
  • see if you can fill out this PDF on Linux with any
    • open source GUI
    • tool
    • programming language. Java and Python have mature libraries. But can they fill out this PDF?

The exact PDF I used is no longer available online because I took so long making the video but I used the one from the Japanese embassy in South Africa. This is the current one, it should give you the same experience I had. Feel free to try it yourself :-)

This is not really a Fedora problem (Okular was originally crashing but I could not reliably reproduce it on video) but since Fedora is the "it just works" distribution I found it relevant to highlight this instance of something absolutely not working, even if it is rather a software problem that only affects a few users.

Speaking of, I don't know where this video belongs or who needs to see this. If you know a place kindly let me know. My goal with this video was

• Therapy/Closure for me
• Opening a discussion on filling out PDF forms on Linux
• Creating supplementary material for all those "How can i fill out PDF forms on Linux?" questions.
• Maybe get some of these bugs fixed? I don't want to tell people what to do and I think the demand is low, but a user can dream.
• Balancing out the euphoric "I just switched to Linux last week and I miss nothing" posts - give it some time! I am happy for you of course, but there are problems and we should be transparent about that.

Colophon: I used OBS Studio to record the screen, piper to generate speech from text and Kdenlive to combine everything and add some "red circles". The voice is an acquired taste, but piper was the best locally runnable open source text-to-speech application I could find. I'm happy to learn about better alternatives.