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Alternatives for drawing / note taking software Onenote (lemmy.ml)
submitted 2 days ago by to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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Is there any alternative to OneNote? Every other note taking app I've seen dosent allow pen input, and for Xournal++ it dosent have all the organisation stuff and bulk exporting

Thanks for your suggestions!

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[–] 9 points 2 days ago* (2 children)

I have been desperately wanting a OneNote clone for years. Back in the early 2010s I used it for a massive project and it was absolute perfection. I’m talking about seriously heavy project with several users and many hundreds of pages, sections etc.

I’ve yet to find anything even approaching being close to as easy and well-organized and well-presented. I looked a little at Obsidian and I’ll try some more to learn it. OneNote took like a minute to learn and everything followed a standard intuitive design as most desktop applications of the day. I’ve been advised to look at Joplin, Obsidian and a few more, and I’ve given them a quick review but none even hold a candle to OneNote. It’s so sad because I’ve moved away from anything MS, and especially because it absolutely refuses to play well with any storage other than OneDrive, so I ended it when MS took away most of everyone’s included storage capacity. That was it for me.

I really wish we could just get an exact clone but one that let the data be on a local server. I would love to be able to use it on Linux and Android, and if possible, iOS. There’s just nothing that is as polished. One of MS’s best products ever. :-(

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  • [–] 8 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 child)

    Huh, interesting. I had the opposite experience.

    I mean the tabs are nice, but then everything is just a clusterfuck of randomly made pages, no tags, bad search, and pretty much only a filesystem of organization (especially in a team). Liked the hand-written to OCR feature though.

    I only found obsidian a bit ago, but getting into wikilinks with every association to another note makes everything very findable, which is the most important if you are looking for a note you made 6 months ago but only know tertiary info about it.

    To each their own!

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  • [–] 1 point 30 minutes ago

    I can totally see what you mean. I guess the thing is maybe due to my age, but coming from a good portion of my life during which organization and pattern-keeping was crucial to accessing your information, I became accustomed to very precise categorization and filing. Therefore I rarely use or need any kind of search mechanism due to not remembering where something is. Indeed, even my entire file system on clients and servers alike is very heirarachical and I only need to search when I need massive quantities of data that will invariably come from many sources.

    I think searchability these days has rendered a sense of organization seem unnecessary by younger people. Even the idea of knowing what a file is and where it is, to many is a foreign concept.

    But I get your point because depending on the size and scope of the project, especially with multiple participants, the idea of a single-minded structure is a joke.

    Maybe I should dedicate some time to learning Obsidian. What I'd really like, to be honest, probably would be better with a personal wiki. I want a complete knowledgebase of everything I document, and that screams wiki. I could segregate stuff into their own projects but what's the benefit? None really. I realize that now. And I can alwyas have access restrictions based on authentication, so that's not a concern.

    Thank you for sharing your insight. 😀

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