I’ve no problem with using LibreOffice for most of my document needs, but i haven’t found a good substitute for microsoft’s OneNote yet. I mainly use it to plan my RPG games and it helps a lot. What alternatives are there for organizing notes on linux, with similar features to those that OneNote provides?
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I am surprised that no one has mentioned Rnote yet.
It is my favourite newly-created program for Linux. It is a relatively new app which supports annotating files and taking handwritten notes. You can import PDFs, set the page size to infinite or a fixed size (something OneNote can’t do), adjust the background to display grids or lines or dots or nothing with any spacing you like, input text with your keyboard, … It is available on Flathub for easy installation.
The only major downside is the following: Disclaimer: The file format is still unstable. It might change and break compatibility between versions.
For text-based notes I use Obsidian.
It isn’t open source, but it writes standard markdown files to disk, so I can switch programs whenever I like and I am not locked into the Obsidian ecosystem with my notes. That was the main reason why I decided against using Joplin, especially after my experience with converting recipes from Nextcloud Cookbook to markdown …
In general I am always trying to find a simple file-based solution for whatever I need to do. I want to be able to sync it with Syncthing instead of something fancier that requires a centralised web server or even relies on a cloud service.
Amkng all note taking apps, FOSS or not, online and offline, Obsidian still holds the top spot unmatched. I don’t even dislike to admit it anymore. It’s just that good and really has almost everything.
oh my god, this looks like the note app i’ve wanted for so long on linux!!
it’s still missing some text formatting features imo, but maybe i could hack those in a submit a patch… definitely keeping on my radar! thank you!
Haha, that’s what I was thinking as well when I first discovered it. Glad you found it through my post!
I took my handwritten notes with PDF Annotator in a Windows VM for over three years …
I looked at Joplin and Obsidian for the kind of notetaking I do and settled on Obsidian. To be honest, both have more features than I use. I like Obsidian because it’s based on Markdown, so you’re not tied to some oddball file format. But you should try them out and see which one fits your work style.
Thanks for the suggestions! I’ll see which one works best for me.
I’m not sure what features of OneNote you are talking about, but maybe logseq will suit your needs.
Here’s an Obsidian RPG Video: https://youtube.com/search?q=obsidian+rpg
I use logseq and notesnook.
Setup Trilium and use the Firefox extension to save screenshots or the whole page to it automatically which I love.
Some which I can think out of my head are : Joplin Trillium Logseq Notion Obsidian Anytype
If you need to draw, I would look into notion and obsidian.
You might look at these relative newcomers to this category of app…with some caveats for why I haven’t switched from Obsidian.
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Acreom - Not open source yet, but planned. Flat markdown files like Obsidian and Logseq. Dealbreaker for me is that in order to use the app on Android, you have to sign in with Google, Apple, or Github and use their cloud for sync. I’m trying to convince the dev to allow their “local first” mantra to permeate all versions of the app regardless of platform. He is very receptive, so we’ll see. If they do, I can see myself switching to Acreom instead of continuing with Obsidian. But that’s the beauty of open file format, you can pack up and leave very easily!
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Notesnook - Is FOSS. But not self-hostable yet. That is on their roadmap. Potential dealbreaker is that it doesn’t support markdown, rather shortcuts that behave similar to markdown syntax. As a result of that and their E2EE, the file format is not as open as Obsidian and others that use simple .md files.
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A Text File… No, really, a simple text file is imo the best way to take notes, you can open it on any computer, it’s fully FOSS, you can sync it in 100 different ways
There’s a program called cherrytree that I think is very underrated. It’s probably not a 1:1 replacement for OneNote but I recommend checking it out in case it fulfills a similar but different need.
Joplin is very advanced
I want to like libre office, but every time I have tried to use it, it ended up crashing eventually
Joplin.
I only really use the web version of it in Linux but I dumped OneNote for notion.
I have some scripts that use their API to send notes from the command line to a db page and some nvim mappings that I’m trying to get to send my buffers to a page but that part is problematic still.
I looked at obsidian but never really tried it out. I don’t like the limits notion has but it’s much faster for me to find my notes than OneNote. I have a metric fuckton of notes
My own use for OneNote was mainly drawing/hand written notes using a drawing tablet. For that use case, I have replaced it with Xournal++
For other notes written with the keyboard, I use simple local markdown files.
All my notes are synced between computers with Syncthing
