I like the app, but cannot commit to a closed source solution.

I do appreciate the local-data first approach, but that is table stakes, especially for something as personal and sensitive as a knowledge base.

The "free for personal use" is a rug that can be yanked anytime without warning. After having a number of closed source but otherwise free pieces of software do this, I do not want to climb the learning curve, nor do I suggest anyone else do so.

I've recently played with an open source alternative called foam, which builds a similar experience to Obsidian but inside a VSCode workspace. It's a new project, but under active development, and is already pretty close to the base Obsidian experience of notes + backlinks + graphing https://github.com/foambubble/foam/

I can highly recommend Obsidian. I avoided Roam due to it being yet another cloud based platform (unless that has changed since it first came out?) My knowledge base is far, far too valuable to have it go up in smoke if the company ever collapses. I'm very much loving Obsidian. It just gets out of my way and lets me write.

Beside the knowledge-base aspects of obsidian, it is also an awesome markdown editor, for two reasons:

a) it blends source-view and render-view very well, I almost never use the actual render-view. Almost as good as Mark Text or Typora, and I wish VSCode would move in that direction either.

b) its BSP-style layout lets you make best use of your screen estate

c) (more of a gimmick, but I love it): When you want to change the theme, it randomizes the order of themes in the list. For any new vault I just pick the one that is on top, and have a different style for different projects.

I tried obsidian but when it starts it doesn’t open a window. I posted to the forum and got a shrug. I try every once in a while thinking an update might fix it, but I obviously don’t know if I could use it even if it started working.

IIRC only the AppImage works properly on Linux. Snap and Flatpak give trouble for many users.

Been using obsidian for my digital garden, found it to be very good.