Hi folks,
New user here on the Forum, long time lurker and long time Whonix user otherwise.
I did perform a customary forum search before starting this topic, which returned nothing (zero, nada).
So: is there any pre-installed .epub reader (or at least, .epub capable software) in the default whonix workstation?
To my awareness there is not. Back when we were deciding whether or not to include a document viewer by default anymore, we were mainly thinking of PDF files, and decided to not include a document viewer because Poppler (the most common PDF-handling library for Linux) was a security hazard, and Tor Browser could already render PDFs quite well. I don’t think Tor Browser can handle EPUB files though, and unless EPUBs are a simple file format containing only trivial data, we’re unlikely to add one because of the security risks it would imply.
That being said, you can install an EPUB viewer from the Debian archives pretty easily.
Thanks for the answer, @arraybolt3 .
I see that both Calibre and Bookworm are available, each with 150+ (shady) dependencies. Oh well 
. You have a valid point not to install stuff like this by default.
Out of curiosity, why do you think they’re shady? Debian is pretty strict about what packages it allows in, you can’t just upload a package and have it be available to the world like you can with some software development package managers.
You can always install software in a separate VM (perhaps one running Kicksecure, or another instance of Whonix-Workstation) if you think it looks dangerous.
At least for Calibre, the dependencies are a bunch of python packages… which are not installed by default, obviously. Hence “shady”. I didn’t mean “vulnerable”, just meant “something which is not installed in Whonix, like Calibre or Bookworm themselves”.
Ah, that makes sense.