The absolute state of pdf editing for office migrations

Im slowly migrating our small office over to mint right now to escape the windows 11 telemetry nightmare. honestly 90% of the transition has been a breeze, but pdfs are still the final boss.

I use okular for myself and it's completely fine, but our accounting folks deal with these insanely convoluted government tax forms with weird proprietary scripts embedded in them. they just completely break on most of our standard foss readers

We used to just pay the adobe tax on their old windows machines, but Im genuinely losing my mind at how bloated that ecosystem is now. Background cloud updaters constantly phoning home, mandatory sign-ins just to redact a local invoice... it basically acts like malware at this point.

I ended up just caving and getting a few perpetual licenses for xodo for the finance team. at least it has a native linux binary and doesn't require a monthly blood sacrifice to a cloud portal just to function offline

tbh its just exhausting that the "open" PDF standard is still practically gatekept by massive saas subscriptions in the business world. curious how other solo sysadmins handle complex interactive forms in corporate environments without surrendering to adobe?

https://redd.it/1trdxd0
@r_linux