Comment by KetoManx64
1 day 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.
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.
>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.
Out of interest what add-ons do you use that make a big difference for your needs?
- Advanced URI: create advanced URI's to run actions like create new note, open daily note, or run Obsidian commands. I then add system wide hotkeys to activate these URI's to quickly either open a new note or create a new note.
- Excalidraw. Create drawings and link/insert notes within your drawings without ever leaving the application.
- omnisearch. Run circles around the native Obsidian search and also has an API that you can interact with through your terminal if you want to add scripts to quickly search your notes for specific things.
- Confluence Integration: My company uses Confluence behind a VPN, so I write all my notes in the very snappy Obsidian interface and then sync them up to Confluence when I'm done.
- Style Settings + Minimal Theme Settings: gives you a GUI to edit all the settings and colors of your theme without having to learn about CSS or parse CSS files.
- Edit History: I sync a subsection of my personal notes with my work computer using Syncthing and setting up ignored folders. This gives me a edit history of my notes that I imagine is similar to what Obsidian's official sync gives you.
- Dataview: still learning this, but let's you treat your Vault as a database and write queries to pull in information from other notes. I use it mostly for scraping my entire Vault for unchecked todo items (Grouped by their parent note name) and showing them in 1 place.
Hope these are helpful :)
Thank you!