OneNote has a really scary number of obvious bugs, with pen input especially. Writing disappears immediately or jumps left and right, the document randomly stops updating the screen, the program gets stuck in a high-CPU loop making huge input lag and needs restarting, selecting writing doesn't select what you draw around but a smaller area inside that, etc. It's incredibly frustrating and difficult compared to the Android pen-based notes app I use, Squid (which has a much narrower focus, but is much better at it).

One drive is blocked at work so onenote is effectively useless to me now.

For now, I've started moving my notes to a static site using hugo. It's a bit less convenient, but until I settle on a better permanent solution at least I have text files I can move around and manipulated in bulk if needed.

it blows my mind that there is no good migration strategy for pc base OneNote databases to cloud based ones.

Export is really the weakest area of OneNote. As far as I can tell, there is no way of batch exporting that also exports embedded attachments (for example, if you embed a PDF or Word document into a page rather than "printing" to the page).

I'll give you two guesses as to why that is.

1. Uncertainty about data export. I don't want to be stuck depending on a third-party proprietary solution for something so important to me. (That said, Microsoft is typically quite good about supporting products for a long time)

2. I actually find Windows unpleasant to use, and much prefer linux. (Arch linux + i3/KDE happens to be my preferred setup).

The documentation isn't very good (it's unclear which version) and I ended up having to install the local version on my Mac and manually copy/past the pages I wanted because the copy notebook dialog didn't work with notebooks that have many pages. The worst part is not being able to access the raw data and simply copy that from one place to another.

I've switched to markdown files on Sublime with the Markdown Editing package for now, because they are easier to read and edit, portable and I can convert my notes to wiki pages, blog posts or documentation very easily. I'm still not 100% happy because of the different flavours and how pandoc converts files differently sometimes (especially lists).

My goal for now is to have a simple way to record (the files) and manage (the folders) notes, collaborate (I currently use gitlab repositories) and potentially use them later, e.g. by copying relevant parts to make posts, documentation etc, or by writing a script that finds relationships based on the content (something I've been thinking about for links I save in Safari or Firefox too - a script that scrapes the pages and builds a tree to organize links automatically).

Maybe a tool that could navigate the files, extract headlines and content to figure out relationships out of the files would be ideal to help me compose new documents and posts.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgizHHd7nOo

However, some of the most important concepts covered in my post are databases, relations between those databases, and editing workflows (markdown, slash commands). As far as I can tell, OneNote does not even attempt to do these things.