[mrob]

I had the opposite experience with Debian Sid a few days ago. I'd been using ALSA for everything without problems, but I was getting annoyed with the forced animations in Evince so I installed Okular instead (which has no forced animations). This brought in a big collection of dependencies, including PulseAudio. MPV immediately stopped working, even after manually configuring it for PulseAudio output. But it turned out PulseAudio wasn't a mandatory dependency for Okular, so I uninstalled it and everything worked perfectly again.

[ausjke]

okular is great for highlighting content etc but it is pretty resource-intensive.

[mrob]

On my 8 year old desktop system (8GB ram, 2.5GHz AMD Phenon II) it feels subjectively faster than Evince because of better UI latency. Resource-intensive is a good thing if the resources are used effectively, eg. for more aggressive speculative rendering, which seems to be the case. On mobile I might care a little more, but the forced animation in Evince (and a growing number of GNOME apps) is a deal-breaker, so I'd prefer Okular even on mobile.