Comment by KetoManx64

20 hours ago

On the inverse, even as a FOSS advocate, my life is too short to only use open source software all the time and to reinvent the wheel and tools that have been put together into one fantastic product by the combined effort of hundreds of people.

I used Joplin for years, I even self hosted the Joplin Sync server, but Obsidian + Community addons runs literal miles around it from a performance and user cusomizability standpoint. Yes, I could stick to being a die hard FOSS user and spend twice as long doing the same tasks, or not even be able to due to lack of community extensions that do the same thing on Joplin's side. I could spend a 100 hours learning how to write a Joplin extension to do what I want and that would be a waste because that's 100 hours less that I've spent focusing on growing the skills that I get paid for. Life is too short to reinvent the wheel every single time.

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KetoManx64

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nine_k  19 hours ago

The product may be fantastic, and thus a force multiplier. But it can see an abrupt end, thus incurring a loss. Whether you win more than you lose, on average, depends on the use case, and the particular advantages. As everything in life, this us a trade-off.

My point is that for long-term, high-investment stuff, in my particular view, the possibility of interruption and loss outweighs any possible upside, and any migration would be costly. Similarly, a move from a house where you lived for 20-30 years by its disruptiveness may tantamount to surviving a flood or a fire.

For "short-term" tools this is not so, very obviously, but they do not need my investment, hence they would incur no loss were I to migrate off them if a replacement exists. I could not replace Google with anything, but then DDG and then Kagi appeared, and largely replaced Google web search for me, quite seamlessly. When a better LLM appears, I will start using it instead of Claude. Etc.

  • Barrin92  15 hours ago

    >the possibility of interruption and loss

    That's not the case here though, Obsidian's a markdown editor. When you own your data and you're using a public plain text format it doesn't matter if your editor is closed source. You can literally open your files in any other. There's no migration cost, that was kind of the point.