Obsidian is now free for work - Obsidian
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I tested it at work (we used Obsidian for a while to build an IT Knowledgebase but since moved away from it) and it really couldn't be simpler.
The main thing that keeps me from trying it is that in order to pay with PayPal you have to use some janky workarounds... As soon as they figure that out I'll absolutely consider it
I've heard about syncthing but fear that it won't be compatible with all my devices
Syncthing-fork for Android is the only tricky bit
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I just cant wrap my head around why they're willing to go so far to gain good will from people by having such a generous free tier, but somehow licensing the code under a FOSS license is out of the question??
Why not just go all the way and make sure everyone who cares about reading the souce could also give you free contributions?
Well, the good news? A wider audience most certainly means a FLOSS suite that can parse the data from it. It doesn't seem very opaque, but more like Markup++.
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It stores your data in plaintext, and simply uses the program to parse special formatting characters. There are no attempts at obfuscation or encryption, and it doesn’t lock you into a walled garden that refuses to play nice with other programs. The program itself is closed-source, but anyone could write an open source version to parse the same info… There just hasn’t been a good reason to do so. Even if Obsidian as a company and program ceases to exist overnight, your data is still safe on your machine and can be read by anyone who cares enough to dig into the file. Hell, you can even open it as the plaintext file and dig through it manually.
There in fact are FOSS alternatives like Joplin. Personally, I actually switched from Joplin to Obsidian due to a larger community (and therefore community-driven plugins) and overall a more polished UX. That being said, I have the security of switching back if Obsidian ever becomes evil or unusable.
Another aspect is that the entire source code is technically viewable (partially obfuscated) since it's a web app. Having written plugins for Obsidian, you're very much interacting with the source code itself. Feels like open source with extra steps and I wish one day they will finally make the switch to true FOSS.
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I like the Markdown-based approach but Sync is way to expensive for my use-case..
Have you seen the community-made self hosted sync plugin?
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I like obsidian specifically because you don't need to rely on some built-in sync tool. The files are right there and in a sane format, you can sync them however you want. I use syncthing for this at home, but the choice is yours
Neat, I didn't know that. I currently use Joplin this way, synced across my devices with Syncthing. Joplin also supports directly syncing to Google Drive or Dropbox (with optional encryption).
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Obsidian is a note taking app. Todoist specializes in creating tasks and scheduling them. They are different tools for different jobs.
That doesn’t change the problems I had with todoist. I was using it in a note taking format, the scheduling part wasn’t really relevant to my use.
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Obsidian is a note taking app. Todoist specializes in creating tasks and scheduling them. They are different tools for different jobs.
You can extend obsidian to basically do anything.
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I use Obsidian between Ubuntu and IOS.. Sync is a bit erratic.. It always... eventually, refreshes, but have not been able to find how to force sync on IOS. Sometimes end up doing trivial changes to see if can get the sync on IOS to trigger.
Ubuntu client shows when it does sync and it does appear to do it fairly quick.
Good to know. Thanks for the real world use info.
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Have you seen the community-made self hosted sync plugin?
I have not, does it work well?
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This post was how I learned about Obsidian.
For those of you that love it, how do you use it daily?
I use it for pretty much everything. Any random crap i need to jot down go into the daily notes with a tag of some sort, Excalidraw extension for any sort of diagrams or a string board for connecting different notes/pictures together, code snippets, documentation etc.
I dont use their sync, but I have proton drive keeping the directory backed up in case of emergencies, and I have a git repo for when i want to officially keep something tracked.
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You mean like the obsidian canvas?
That's the thing, thank you! I tried looking before and couldn't find anybody doing it. Maybe I discounted obsidian because it wasn't free or foss. If it's free now and the format is open then that helps a lot.
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I have not, does it work well?
Yeah, works nice as long as you have a server to host it on.
The only annoyance is that it's not very space efficient and you have to rebuild your database like twice a year to bring the size back down. It might be not that bad depending on what you do. I create above thousand new lines of notes with a lot of pictures every day and I'm at around 2GB after rebuilding the database. I expect it to go up to like 6GB biyearly, but, again, clicking on the rebuild button deals with that.
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This post was how I learned about Obsidian.
For those of you that love it, how do you use it daily?
Not daily, but their canvas feature has a feature that lets you embed previews of your files into the flow charts you make. It's pretty nice, since you can have shorter files entirely visible with everything else. Makes it pretty good for software development and project management, in my experience.
Careful not to go overboard with it, though. I feel like a lot of people fall down the "productivity pipeline" when using it, where they end up procrastinating by trying to optimize every little thing and end up doing nothing at all.
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Looks like it was deprecated last year, though
It was yeah. But there's a fork which is much better.
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It's interesting that a closed-source app has good reputation among FOSS enthusiasts. Surely they are not a Microsoft or Apple, but still who controls your computer, you or them?
I've been really enjoying trilium as an open source alternative but fair warning it's not as polished as Obsidian
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I would love to move off OneNote but the lack of alternatives that support inking is disappointing.
For sure. I've been looking for a solid OneNote replacement for a few years now. Inking is the only major barrier.
I really like OneNote, and I've been using it for more than 10 years. But in recent years, my dislike for Microsoft has grown to the point where I feel I need to stop using all their products.
Right now I'm using xournal++ a lot. It has really excellent drawing functionality; but zero organisational functions. (I'm organising my xournal notes using just file names and folder structure.)
What I really want is integrated xournal support with Obsidian, or Joplin. In Joplin, I've tried inserting a pdf into my notes, and telling Joplin to open the pdf by launching xournal++. That sort of works; but the viewing of the pdf in Joplin shows a window-within-a-window; and the creating of new notes is fiddly; so I decided it wasn't quite good enough.
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I like obsidian specifically because you don't need to rely on some built-in sync tool. The files are right there and in a sane format, you can sync them however you want. I use syncthing for this at home, but the choice is yours
I used to get a lot of merge conflicts working with obsidian and syncthing, as I'd edit on my phone and my computer(s).
Honestly started considering just spinning up a git repo, but knowing me I'd forget to commit lol
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It is a really good app. But was a pain in the ass to keep the archive in sync using multiple different platforms without paying for their sync addon in my experience. You can roll your own sync with stuff like Syncthing, cloud storage, etc. But the archive had a bad habit of seemingly finding ways to get out of sync.
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It is a really good app. But was a pain in the ass to keep the archive in sync using multiple different platforms without paying for their sync addon in my experience. You can roll your own sync with stuff like Syncthing, cloud storage, etc. But the archive had a bad habit of seemingly finding ways to get out of sync.
I just paid for the sync
️It’s $4 a month, I drink one beer less a month and I actually save 3€
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This post was how I learned about Obsidian.
For those of you that love it, how do you use it daily?
I use Obsidian as a tool to help my shitty memory.
I want to have one single place where I can go search for a thing I know I saw somewhere but can't remember where or what it was exactly
"Did I watch movie X" -> Obsidian -> Watchlist -> Movies and there it'll be.
Same for tv-series, anime, books, games. Yes there are services that do it like Trakt, Imdb, Letterboxd, TVMaze and god knows how many for games. They all get enshittified eventually requiring you to pay for basic functionality (looking at you trakt...)
I'm building a tool for getting my data out from all those services into Obsidian markdown format, maybe It'll get finished some day
(IMDB and Goodreads work, but you need to do a manual csv export)"How did I install that finicky piece of software last time" -> Obsidian, I wrote something down because I knew I couldn't remember it. Then I'll improve the guide + refresh with new data.
Now I have a pretty good step-by step guide on how to set up a computer, no matter the OS, just how I like it - all in Obsidian. Mostly just commands I copy-paste and some manual steps that I can't be arsed to automate.
Same with my daily notes, I just write down what I did maybe with some tags so I can find them when I start wondering when did I visit X or put up the curtains in the bedroom.
