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.
Did you know that you can even sync your note using git and thus a git remote server for syncing? It even works with iOS 😃
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 use logseq and notesnook.
Setup Trilium and use the Firefox extension to save screenshots or the whole page to it automatically which I love.
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.
Here’s an Obsidian RPG Video: https://youtube.com/search?q=obsidian+rpg
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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On the windows side of things (at my job) i dumped onenote for cherry tree. Its on portable apps website.
Not sure for linux. I run linux at home but only need one note- like programs at work.
This came up a few days ago in another community, and it sounds like the poster may have actually had a similar use-case to your own.
I want to like libre office, but every time I have tried to use it, it ended up crashing eventually
Obsidian could work, its a markdown editor but I doesn’t have any handwriting or drawing support, also its sync feature costs money but you can use nextcloud or github to sync your stuff anyway. An opensource alternative would be logseq but I prefer Obsidian
Joplin is very advanced
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
