I envy the person who has been able to avoid Notion advertising in the past ~5 years.

Rare is it that I am envied.

Obsidian I've enjoyed, but find it difficult to become fluent with it.

It is almost unbelievable to me that anyone who's been able to become aware of & use a niche app like Obsidian has never come across Notion. Obsidian is definitely a power-user tool, which one would usually use after considering the other options, with Notion being almost as default as a choice as Evernote once was.

Additionally, a lot of apps now are even using it as their support bases. It almost feels unavoidable at this point.

Not sure what to tell you. A sharp new developer I respect a lot pointed me towards Obsidian, and so it goes. Other than that, my recent search history shows the past few years are focused on python, pola.rs, Rust, data science, databricks, Oracle, Postgres, DuckDB, and the legal and administrative aspects of running a business, with the occasional dataset documentation search.

This is equally bizarre to me, and I haven't used either. I definitely hear about Obsidian more on HN and at work because coworkers use it.

But knowing what Obsidian is and not Notion is sort of like knowing what Markdown is but having never heard of Microsoft Word.

Couldn't have said it better myself. Seems kind of weird to me, but if the poster is telling the truth, it's like buying an iPhone and never hearing about the iPad.

There's two of us! Although Obsidian only made it to awareness for me - I haven't used it. But I hadn't heard of Notion.

Could you explain obsidian to me? It just looks like a markdown editor with hyperlinks to me

That is my take too. For R&D/tech transfer I have found it useful, but I haven't had my socks blown away yet.

I had never even heard of Notion before I started looking at Obsidian.

The website is Technology Review. If course it's an ad.