this post was submitted on 03 Jan 2024
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Privacy

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OneNote Alternatives (lemm.ee)
submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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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:

  1. 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

  2. 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

  3. 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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[–] [email protected] 15 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Few options come to mind but the top two are either Joplin or Obsidian.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Obsidian is good but not sure how well it works on touchscreen.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago (2 children)

The issue I ran into with obsidian is that it saves the file with each keystroke. I wanted to store my notes in proton drive but the constant saving would cause it to error out. There is no adjustment on the save interval either. This is probably done to push people into paying for their cloud service. It felt like too much of a hassle and I’m not a huge note taker anyways so I get by with the notes app on my phone.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

I have my obsidian in a seafile folder and the constant syncing doesn't cause any issues. Sounds like a proton drive issue

Also if you are into self hosting, obsidian-live sync works very well across all my windows, Linux and android clients.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Interesting. I do pay for their sync because I was having issues with Syncthing causing conflicts. But I also host a Seafile server locally and it is syncing my Obsidian vault with every computer/device I sign into and haven't had problems so far.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Obsidian for sure. Look at the Excalidraw plugin for handwriting/drawing. It's quite good.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] iab 5 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Is Obsidian open source?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

You said there’s no nesting, is that the equivalent to pages in one note since that is somewhat important to me

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

That definitely sounds a little weird to me but another comment said there’s plugins or addons or something would there be one for organizing them or probably not

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Thanks. I’m assuming there’s just like an extension page for excalidraw in obsidian like there would be a web browser

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Yep, it's in the community apps store for free, though highly recommend throwing some money at the dev if you find it to be useful. I'm just barely scratching the service and it's pretty dang good.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

That sounds good to hear then

You have a link for downloads

Also someone else said it has auto saves which messes up stuff in proton drive

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Can't link directly to the plugin, but the github page for it is here

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Oh that’s helpful too but u was asking for me obsidian my bad lol

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago (1 children)

+1 for Obsidian

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I think I’m going to go with obsidian

Stupid question where can I download it

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

obsidian.md

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Thanks!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Of the top of my head, maybe either

  • Logseq (should be rather like Obsidian but open source)
  • Xournal++, I do not know if it has the organising features or cross note search
[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I was gonna check out obsidian since that seems to be popular and open source isn’t a necessity for me but thanks for the option

And for xournal yeah the cross note is something I would definitely rather have but thank :)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

I tried both Obsidian and Logseq and… Obsidian is just a pleasure

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

I switched to Joplin and it's been okay, lots of plugins but I've stuck to just vanilla thus far. The built in syncing plus encryption built-in makes for easy setup so I didn't need to setup rclone.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I've used StandardNotes for years. They are great, very privacy friendly and lots of good features. I've also used Obsidian like others have mentioned but I didn't use 95% of the features on either standard notes or Obsidian -- now days I just use a general markdown files and store them in a git repo -- low complexity and I like the simplicity of it. 100% recommend.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

I’ll give it standard notes shot. Does it have the ability to hand write notes. It also has its own cloud saves and a manual local save if I’m reading that right so that sounds perfect for proton drive since someone else said obsidian has a weird autosave