Hi. Basically, I’m asking for suggestions. Do you know any good note taking app that works on linux desktop? I’m looking for something that I can use instead of Notion or Obsidian, with some nice to have:
- Open source (that’s the reason I’m not that much into Obsidian, it could disappear tomorrow and I could not replace it with a community maintained fork)
- Markdown based. I’d like to know that I can replace that app for another one when I want, and that’s not possible when they use their own obscure format
- Local. I’m not interested in paying monthly for cloud storage. And actually, I’d prefer to know for certain that nothing leaves my local machine
- Nice UX. I know that using plain text files and vim might do the job, but I’d like something more user friendly and with nice features (Notion, for example, nails it in my opinion)
- Bonus: Can also be used on android (I’m aware this is a though one, and is not a deal breaker)
I know that all those requirements are hard to fulfill and I don’t even know if something like that exists, so I’d appreciate any kind of suggestion. For example, It’d be great if an open source like that exists, but I’m not completely closed to open-source-ish proprietary apps (e.g. licenses not really open but close enough), as long as they are free to use and work on linux.
Edit: Thanks for the suggestions, everyone. The most suggested alternative was Joplin so I’ll give it a try. However, as most of you mentioned, at the core it’s all markdown so I could easily try the other alternatives with the same knowledge base at a later point :)
How’s the data portability? Like, if you decide to move everything away from it, for whatever reason, would your notes be easily migrated to another platform?
When I ditched Evernote, the nightmare to get my notes into a different platform really left a sour taste in my mouth.
Now I prefer plain txt files for anything I plan to keep, and something like Synology Notes for things I need organized, but wouldn’t care if they were trapped in the Synology Notes platform.
It’s also just markdown text files, saved locally (but syncronizable to cloud/webdav etc…). So in short, yeah you can move things back and forth between joplin and obsidian, or one of many many markdown editors.
Pretty big caveat to that though. Joplin names the individual text files some huge hexadecimal value, unlike Obsidian (and maybe Loseq). And it appends some meta data in the file itself.
I personally felt this was unacceptable for my use case. And if Logseq’s android app wasn’t so bad, is be using it instead of Obsidian.
Is that just the desktop version? I cannot see any such option on the mobile version.
both mobile and desktop have the plaintext notes in a sqlite db. they’re “easy enough” to export if you’re bailing on the app, but not to regularly switch between two different apps
well worth noting if you do have it set to say syncronize (mine goes to nextcloud but the app has options for file system, dropbox, onedrive, webdav). The syncronized version will be all plain text .md files in markdown language. simple enough to point something else to that directory.
Sounds awesome!