Obsidian (knowledge management, kinda new): anyone using it?

This is not so much a help request as it is a solicitation of experience, but Obsidian is a rather new app and is only on the AUR at the moment, so here seemed the best place to ask.

Is anyone using it? Of course I could download it and find out for myself that which I seek, but it is a knowledge manager/note taking/mind mapping sort of big digital briefcase application, and I tend to invest lots of energy very quickly into those. So before I potentially waste time transferring a bunch of notes or making new ones that then live in an obscure place on my hard drive until I rediscover them a decade hence and think oh! that was not a bad idea but now I’m too tired:

Obsidian runs on/inside Electron, and my experience with Atom (the Electron-based text editor that is wildly popular among… people with lots of CPU cycles to spare?), when I tried to work with several long documents, was very disappointing: it would lag and/or become unresponsive, it would not remember my settings, and was generally slow and CPU intensive in handling simple plain-text files. So I am wary of electron-based apps, especially since I know I would be throwing tens of thousands of words at Obsidian almost immediately and expecting it to work reasonably well for a not-yet-1.0 app.

So. Anybody tried it? How well does it work for you with, say, multiple documents open? Large documents open? Multiple large documents open? With plenty of pdf and jpg attachments? Etc?

For reference, I’m using Manjaro on an HP EliteBook 810 that runs an Intel i5-4300U CPU with 8GB RAM. Not the newest, but not quite the oldest yet. Am thinking about getting a used PC desktop tower with a newer i7, but that is still in the musing stage and not even an imminent reality yet. My computing power will be staying 5-10 years behind “current” no matter what, though.

Please keep comments as dispassionate as possible. I’m not trying to start a flame thread on Electron apps; I’m trying to find a notebook/knowledge manager that can work for me and my oldish hardware.

Thanks!

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I’m a sucker for these kind of apps, I’ve never seen it but it looks oke.

Like the markdown.
The mindmap style links are nice.
Not that keen on the electron.

Currently using text files since that works on everything and is local.

Trying this atm, remind me if I forget to reply in a few day’s.

Edit: and thanks for posting this :+1:

Cool. Yeah I’m a sucker for these things too, and I also am just using a text editor and a directory tree of plain text files right now because ultra-portable!

I settled on an app called Notebooks on my ancient iMac after a couple of others stopped active development. Although most of my documents in it are plain text, it uses markdown/html for formatted documents and can hold links to .pdfs and other files, which is useful for notating and indexing the absurd number of pdfs, jpgs, epubs, and other formatted information files I have collected over the last quarter-century.

But it is Mac-only, and I am done with Apple’s refusal even to consider backwards compatibility in its aggressive upgrade cycle. They seem to think we should toss our machines every couple of years.

Nah. Put Linux on them instead. :slight_smile:

I have a knack for stackedit. I have tried a lot of different note taking apss but I keep returning to stackedit - it works in browser and you can save on popular storage providers - and it is a markdown editor.

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Cool. I’ll take a look at it!

Bro, how did you installed Obsidian on Manjaro?
On their site I’ve found only directions for ubuntu & redhat
ps: I’m pretty lame in unix systems )

Hi,

Obsidian is in the AUR so you would install it with:

pamac build obsidian

Hi @Gregor,

Obsidian is also available as a FlatPak:

$ flatpak search obsidian     
Name                                  Description                             Application ID                                Version           Branch          Remotes
Obsidian                              Markdown-based knowledge base           md.obsidian.Obsidian                          0.11.13           stable          flathub
Obsidian-2 Gtk Theme                  Obsidian-2 theme                        org.gtk.Gtk3theme.Obsidian-2                  2.18              3.22            flathub
Obsidian-2-Teal Gtk Theme             Obsidian-2-Teal theme                   org.gtk.Gtk3theme.Obsidian-2-Teal             2.18              3.22            flathub
Obsidian-2-Red Gtk Theme              Obsidian-2-Red theme                    org.gtk.Gtk3theme.Obsidian-2-Red              2.18              3.22            flathub
Obsidian-2-Purple Gtk Theme           Obsidian-2-Purple theme                 org.gtk.Gtk3theme.Obsidian-2-Purple           2.18              3.22            flathub
Obsidian-2-Mint Gtk Theme             Obsidian-2-Mint theme                   org.gtk.Gtk3theme.Obsidian-2-Mint             2.18              3.22            flathub
Obsidian-2-Indigo Gtk Theme           Obsidian-2-Indigo theme                 org.gtk.Gtk3theme.Obsidian-2-Indigo           2.18              3.22            flathub
Obsidian-2-Green Gtk Theme            Obsidian-2-Green theme                  org.gtk.Gtk3theme.Obsidian-2-Green            2.18              3.22            flathub
Obsidian-2-Gray Gtk Theme             Obsidian-2-Gray theme                   org.gtk.Gtk3theme.Obsidian-2-Gray             2.18              3.22            flathub
Obsidian-2-Aqua Gtk Theme             Obsidian-2-Aqua theme                   org.gtk.Gtk3theme.Obsidian-2-Aqua             2.18              3.22            flathub
Obsidian-2-Amber Gtk Theme            Obsidian-2-Amber theme                  org.gtk.Gtk3theme.Obsidian-2-Amber            2.18              3.22            flathub

So it can easily be installed that way:

$ flatpak install md.obsidian.Obsidian
[...]
ID                                    Branch           Op          Remote           Download
1. [✓] md.obsidian.Obsidian.Locale           stable           i           flathub           6.3 kB / 2.6 MB
2. [✓] md.obsidian.Obsidian                  stable           i           flathub          93.1 MB / 95.5 MB
ID                                    Branch           Op          Remote           Download
1. [✓] md.obsidian.Obsidian.Locale           stable           i           flathub           6.3 kB / 2.6 MB
2. [✓] md.obsidian.Obsidian                  stable           i           flathub          93.1 MB / 95.5 MB

Installation complete.

Thanks a lot!