I saw on Slashdot today that Acroread 7 for Linux is on their FTP server, so I grabbed a copy today. The download is indeed a bit large (39M), but the rpm installed flawlessly on my redhat9 box, and the startup time is short. Practically instantaneous. I do have a mighty cool box (except for the redhat9 bit), but still.
It looks very pretty. It uses GTK as the widget set, but they messed with it a bit. The tear-off tabs at the tops of menus are gone. Not a killer, but it would have been nice to have.
There’s an excellent article here, and you can download here.
Here at work I don’t have a particularly “mighty cool box” (hand-me-down dual PII-400’s or something like that), but the Acro7 menus show a visible delay if you go between them. I don’t really use the menus much (at all?) so I don’t know that to be a big deal. People in the slashdot discussion mentioned free alternatives (gpdf, evince, etc), but I’ve never seen one work as well as the (very imperfect) official Acrobat reader. All I want is the left/right arrows to change the page for me. Is that so hard? -e;