The killer feature of Obsidian was the wikilinks, but now that other editors are getting that feature it is replaceable.

But the other killer feature is avoiding vendor lock-in. With some apps your notes are on their servers in an inscrutable data format, and some apps don't even let you export without paying. With markdown notes on the other hand you can take your notes anywhere, sync them with git, dropbox, syncthing, etc.

You're not bound to obsidian, and your markdown notes format will always be readable, unlike many of today's formats! See [1] "LibreOffice is better at reading old Word files than Word"

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38906331

It's entirely possible to just stick your files in dropbox or something like that and they sync just fine.

I found that trying to sync (Windows Obsidian app «=» Android Obsidian app) just via a cable would get the files over fine, but would not produce usable results, at least not without a lot more fiddling that I wanted to do. I was hoping that we could simply transfer the folder structure over and just have it work, but no such luck.

Evidently it requires not only transfer, but some kind of transformation that they do in their cloud, and I'm not interested in another cloud subscription, particularly one so specific. (Happy to pay for the software & updates, just not to maintain the subscription and maintain the concern about another connection in the loop)

This was a couple years ago. Perhaps this has changed, or there's now a plugin to make such a bidirectional transfer work?

TIA for any suggestions!

There is a popular method which I use. Syncing the vault between devices with Syncthing.

It reportedly causes problems if you edit the same file in two different places at the same time, it will generate a conflict when saving since the files won't match, doesn't affect me in my workflow (if I have access to my desktop I won't use it on my phone) but YMMV

Syncthing is a wonderful predict with a short but steep learning curve.

Once you actually understand how sync works in details it does wonders.

What were the problems you encountered?

Obsidian creates a hidden directory in your “vault,” which contains plugin files, plus metadata about your settings, currently opened files, etc. If those settings don’t work equally well on both systems, that would be a hassle. Maybe try copying all the files from inside the directory (so that you don’t grab that hidden dir when you do) instead of grabbing the whole directory.

You might also want to look at the git-obsidian plugin. It takes a little setup, but seems to work well once it’s going.

I just backup and sync the files with google drive and everything works well, but I also don't have any plugins installed so I can't vouch for those.

I can highly recommend to use Git, the Obsidian Git plugin on Desktop and Termux on Android for syncing. Works great! I have documented my setup here: https://github.com/davidkopp/termux-scripts/

I'm syncing using Syncthing, across three devices which are only syncing intermittently (home laptop, smartphone, work computer), and it appears to work fine. I cannot recall ever having a sync conflict. But then again, I'm hardly using any plugins in Obsidian.

I think it depends on what you use notes for. Just a scratchpad of random, mostly ephemeral ideas or simple folders? Notes is probably good enough.

Obsidian is designed for those people that want to minmax their note taking and find reasons to increase productivity by providing robust linking and search capabilities within any document. The photos in the OP are a good example of how many people use Obsidian.

That said, I'm not an expert (never used it personally), but that's how I understand it.

You can sync just fine without a subscription. As you already mentioned iCloud, just put your vault there and get syncing for free.

you can use alternative for syncing that are quite well integrated even if a bit more complex to set up

There's a simple git-sync plugin plus you can just stick your vault in a cloud service

Mainly I prefer to be able to move my data around. I'm pretty sure those formats are really hard to you data out of. I know it doesn't seem like an issue now, but it might be if you ever decide to leave Apple's Ecosystem. On principle, I will not support systems that design their products to lock you into platforms.