First off wanted to say thank you for everyone who chimed in on my last post a while ago starting my privacy journey
Anyways with my classes starting up again I was looking for a OneNote alternative as I almost had a small oopsy daisy with trying to move my OneNote off of OneDrive and hey Microsoft I appreciate backing up files but I have proton drive for that
Anyways as for a one note alternative stuff I do have a few requirements and preferences:
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I use a surface with a touchscreen and a fold back keyboard to use as a tablet and a pen for handwriting notes but I also like to type sometimes so something that has palm rejection and plays nice with with the touchscreen
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I use it across multiple devices, mainly note taking on the aforementioned surface laptop but also view them on my home computer since I do some schoolwork on that because nice monitor and keyboard :) but I’m mostly just viewing on that computer - basically I would either like cloud saving to get that across devices OR the ability to save the files to proton drive
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Not really a necessity but the ability to organize notes like one note where I can have a “book” > “category/chapter” > “page”
Really point 1 and 2 are my priority but if I had to choose I’d say point 1 with playing nice for the touch screen and pen takes priority but I also definitely wouldn’t mind having something that makes it easy to save with ideally a cloud save that does the work for me but I’m probably capable of setting the directory to save it to proton drive
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Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
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Obsidian for sure. Look at the Excalidraw plugin for handwriting/drawing. It’s quite good.
Obsidian is not just an alternative, it is better.
Getting rid of all the formatting bullshit makes notetaking better. Honestly, I consider this to be the killer feature of Obsidian – no styles. No fonts. No font sizes. No weird/unpredictable line breaks or fights with bullets. No jimmying about images trying to get them in the right places. OneNote needs a plaintext mode to even hope to compete.
The linking is nice. I am very skeptical that the knowledge graph is useful, but I won’t be mad at people who like it.
Once you’re used to the mathtex syntax, it’s a fine way to do formula entry. And with the right extension, the way it handles tables is just fine.
The only thing OneNote does that Obsidian doesn’t is nested notes. I really wish Obsidian let you define an “index” note for a folder that would let you mimic the nested note feature of OneNote. And that it would let you manually re-order notes to be in whatever order you want (maybe achieved by a TOC on the index note or some such). Maybe there’s an extension that does that? OP seems to want the same functionality. I work around it by just making an “!TOC” file that sits in roots rather than relying on actual file hierarchy.
You said there’s no nesting, is that the equivalent to pages in one note since that is somewhat important to me
Notes are organized alphabetically in folders in Obsidian. The philosophy behind it is that it really wants you to be using links to connect notes to each other rather than hierarchies.
It wants your notes to be like Wikipedia, not a chronological notebook.
Is Obsidian open source?
The app is not. That said, since it’s literally a front end for markdown files, the file format is universal and can be opened on anything with a text editor. No conversion or export needed.
I know some folks won’t use it if it’s not FOSS, and I respect that decision. For me there isn’t an open source alternative that is as good. Joplin stores your data in an SQL file, that’s a deal breaker for me. Logseq seems to be so outline/task oriented that I’ve not been able to use it the way I want to.
Also notable for Obsidian that it is totally free for nearly anyone who uses it (only needs to be paid for explicit commercial use with 2 or more people or if you want to use one of their superfluous datahosting options) and that their privacy policy is pretty explicit that they gather nothing.
If they ever paywall useful features, I’d definitely be off to different pastures… with full access to all my data since it’s just plaintext files.
I’d also prefer for it to be FOSS, and if the open source community ever knocks it off (preferably including compatibility with the existing plugins), I’d jump on that even if it were a bit less polished. I’m definitely one of those people who will chose a worse FOSS alternative just because it’s FOSS. But yeah, similar to you, I don’t think anything that is compatible with my needs.
Acreom Not FOSS yet, but on their road map. So I’m keeping an eye on it. Still plain markdown files at its core. One deal breaker for me is that they require a login for Mobile app, at least Android. Which makes no sense to me. They advertise “local first” and “no account required” on their site, yet you can’t use the mobile app without signing into their service. If they ever stop being silly about that part, I may take another look. Their task management and to-do is better than anything I’ve found in Obsidian to date.