When I worked as a consultant, I loved OneNote on the Windows 7 machine I had to use. When moving to Windows 10 OneNote had become a version mess between the free and paid one… and then work allowed me to move to another operating system. Needless to say non-Windows versions of OneNote are not as feature rich nor usable as the one I was used to.

I’ve spent some time looking up for solutions that were secure (according to my threat model), interoperable, sustainable and user friendly. I also need the solution to work well on GNOME, macOS, and iOS. I’ve covered Nextcloud, Joplin, Logseq and Obsidian. Here is why I decided to settle on Obsidian.

In a previous post I mentioned my quest for an interoperable successor to OneNote, and how I ended up settling with Obsidian. I often braindump in bed, before picking up the ideas and fleshing them out on a computer the next day. This means I need to synchronise Obsidian between my computers and phone.

I have an iPhone, a GNOME personal laptop and a work MacbookPro. I need a solution to synchronise Obsidian between all those devices, that doesn’t store data unencrypted on a machine I don’t own, and that is sustainable. Let’s cover the most popular solutions and why I decided to go with Obsidian Sync.