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TLDR: I recently found out there is "deprecated" XFA format that acrobat still uses in their programs, and government forms have those for dynamic contents in the form that we cannot fill using other softwares. Looking for solutions.

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This has been a problem since a long time. Back in 2020 I had dual boot because I needed acrobat to fill PDF forms, but after finding xournal++ program I nuked windows partition. Windows update messing up grub was one of the reason I decided to nuke windows and looking at the posts recently it's still a huge issue.

So the problem I recently encountered is that even the government issued PDF forms need acrobat reader (which is free software for PDF, but only available in windows and mac). Which I didn't think would be an issue and just filled the form in Firefox.

Turns out that was problematic as the PDF forms has fields that are automatically filled, calculated from other fields, only made available when certain checkboxes are checked, etc. and Firefox doesn't support that. Even trying to install the acrobat reader snap (which uses wine) in a VM and opening the PDF on it didn't work. The UI makes me think it's a really old version of the reader.

So without searching for other devices (and filling a PDF with my sensitive information) what solution is there? Installing windows is a hassle even in a VM, and it will use up precious SSD memory. But that's the only solution I can think of.

I also found masterpdf or something like that which the Arch wiki says has support for that, but it didn't work. It says XFA forms are converted to acro forms, and the dynamic part doesn't work. There are websites that promise to work for such forms, but I'm not going to be putting sensitive info on web apps.

I could research this on my own, but was interested in hearing from the community.

Software tends to fall in categories based on who has control, how it is accessed, and who owns the data.

For instance, a FOSS project hosts encrypted user data for free, and the user easily controls who accesses it, but if the server/service goes down, users lose access to everything. Or, a user has their own offline files they control 100%, but sharing is more cumbersome.

Where does git fall in this spectrum? It seems that it's a mix, where authoritative copies may be offline at times before merging, when it returns to the hosted version. Its hosted, but can be self-hosted, and multiple copies of code canbee offline as well. Does it rely on a central source hosting, and a company willing to support the software?

I've never contributed to a project with version control before, though I've worked in a few places that used JIRA or git. It interests me how it works, and I'm just curious to read a Lemmy discussion while it's raining where I am.

(As I prepare to press SUBMIT it occurs to me this is a FOSS question more than a Linux one. If this is a stupid post for this /r/, please report/remove or ask me to and I will.)