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Its no secret that Linux is the ugly stepchild of proprietary application support, and ugly is the operative word here. Only a couple of years ago, using the Linux-supporting versions of Adobe Acrobat Reader, RealPlayer and the Citrix client made me feel as though I was back in the days of DOS.
Its taken some time, but vendors such as Real are beginning to come around. New offerings make Linux, if not yet a first-class platform citizen (the shiny RealPlayer 10 for Linux remains DRM-challenged), then at least one thats on the road to parity in terms of application compatibility.
Now Adobe Systems has stepped forward with Version 7.0 of its Acrobat Reader for Linux. (Adobe shipped a 5.0 version but opted against putting out a 6.0 release.) The feature that has me most excited in Version 7.0, which was released this month, is its finally sane file open dialog.
It may seem like a minor point, but a lack of niceties—such as hidden files that can actually be hidden and the capacity for creating a new folder in which to drop PDFs—have proved a major pain for me and have kept me coming back to the less feature-rich but friendlier PDF clients that ship with KDE and GNOME.
So, Linux users, dont cheat yourself; treat yourself, and download your copy at www.adobe.com.