Scribus
Free page layout program for newsletters, flyers and booklets. The closest thing Linux has to Microsoft Publisher.
Our verdict
Scribus is the Linux answer to desktop publishing, and it aims higher than Microsoft Publisher ever did. It is built for work that goes to a commercial printer, with real control over colour, bleed and PDF output.
That ambition is also the catch. Publisher was designed so that someone could make a church newsletter on a Sunday afternoon without learning anything. Scribus expects you to place a text frame, link it to the next frame and think about colour profiles. Give it a weekend rather than an hour.
Your old .pub files will not open in it. Nothing on Linux opens them. Convert them to PDF on the Windows machine before you switch, then rebuild anything you still need to edit.
What's good
- Free, with no subscription and no account
- Made for print work, so a professional printer can take the PDF it produces without arguing
- Proper control over CMYK colour, bleed and spot colours, which Publisher never really had
- Handles long documents such as booklets and newsletters with master pages
What to know first
- Cannot open Microsoft Publisher .pub files, so old work has to be rebuilt or exported to PDF first
- The interface is dated and expects you to know print terms like frames and bleed
- Steeper to learn than Publisher, which was built for people who did this once a year
- The Flathub version is community maintained rather than published by the Scribus team
The details
- Cost
- Free
- Open source
- Yes (GPL-2.0-or-later)
- How you install it
- App store (Flatpak), .deb installer, .rpm installer, AppImage download, Built-in app store
Windows apps it can replace
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