Nice app, like the idea of it being just plain text, but will stick to one note myself. The synch service is a must for me, and don’t want to pay for another service, when onenote and onedrive synch all that I need.
An interesting app nevertheless and am sure will suit many users.
There is Self-hosted LiveSync which syncs against a (selfhosted) CouchDB and works perfectly fine.
Try Notion. I changed from OneNote to it and don’t regret it.
Joplin user here. What does obsidian have that I might want? I remember briefly trying it years ago and disliking it.
Joplin stores its files inside a database. Obsidian stores all notes as individual plaintext Markdown files.
In the first instance, that’s clearly more future-proof and robust - your notes are immediately available in any application without a layer of abstraction. You can’t have a single file corrupt and destroy all your notes.
I vastly prefer it for that reason. I want to know these notes are still going to work fine in 10 years, and be easily accessible.
Obsidian is great; I was a happy user for a couple years. But I recently switched to Logseq and I think I’m already liking it more, and it’s because of something Logseq doesn’t do.
Obsidian lets you write a full markdown file, so step one is deciding how to write something down. Is it a nested list? Or a table? Or headings and subheadings with paragraphs?
In Logseq, everything is a nested list. This feels like a limitation, but I’ve been preferring it. The decision is made for you: you’re going to jot this information down as a list. So then you just start writing it.
People often tout that Logseq is open source, and while that is great, IMO there is also a design consideration that makes it better. Pretty much any kind of information you want to write down can be represented as a nested list. Doing it that way keeps everything simple, consistent, and more searchable. (Logseq’s built-in querying feature seems to be more powerful than Obsidian’s Dataview plugin, although I can’t say much about it since I haven’t really played with it yet.)
Both Obsidian and Logseq save (kinda) standard markdown files, so if you spend a lot of time in a plain text editor, you can still use that. You don’t lose anything by editing a file in a separate editor – they will both parse and re-index the file next time you view it in the respective app.
In Logseq, everything is a nested list. This feels like a limitation, but I’ve been preferring it. The decision is made for you: you’re going to jot this information down as a list. So then you just start writing it.
I really appreciate you posting this. I’m a long-time Obsidian user, and an Evernote user before that, and I never “got” Logseq. I just couldn’t understand what people saw in an app that didn’t let you “write” anything. I’ve tried to start using Logseq so many times and just given up because the interface made no sense.
Thanks to your comment I finally get it! I prefer to be using something open-source, so I’m going to give Logseq another go, now that I finally understand it, and see how that approach feels.
Do you know cherryTree and if yes, how it compares to the two?
On the topic of note taking programms.
Is there anything like onenote that is linux compatible, especially for handwritten notes? The closest in regards to decent handwriting support I could find was xournal++ but that felt kind of limiting to me especially without the infinite canvas and the ability to switch notes within the program (think onenote sidebar)
There really isn’t. I hunted for a while before I gave up and bought an android tablet for hand writing notes.
What do you use on android? The main thing I want linux compatibility for is for reading my notes on my computer, not for actually creating them. I thought about just annotating PDFs directly but I’m not sure how good that will work
If you’re using Android then just use Onenote on Android and use the web version of Onenote to read them on Linux
That’s basically what I’m doing right now but the web version sucks in my opinion. Embedded content takes forever to load since and it’s not cached across sessions which makes quickly switching between multiple pages annoying
