I work from home, so the last thing I want to do on my leisure time is sit at the same desk I’ve sat at for the last 8 hrs. So I lounge on the couch and play through my huge steam deck library. It is not a cheap device, to be sure. But I felt it was absolutely worth it for me.

Portables are the best for this, imo. Steam Deck or a used 3DS are my choices. The latter is easy to mod and play all sorts of games including the gigantic DS/3DS library.

I find both systems clutch for the suspend function. Lets you pick right back up where you were. I will say the 3ds is much better at this with clamshell design that suspends on closing the lid and it’s battery life in suspend is fantastic!

I also find stress relief games. Mindless 3rd person action games for me. Mad Max was great because I could drive around picking fights or crashing stuff. The Batman Arkham games and the Shadow of Mordor games are other great examples for me. I have not found any relaxing “cozy” games that work for me. Nothing has really grabbed my attention enough to stick with.

Pretty big caveat to that though. Joplin names the individual text files some huge hexadecimal value, unlike Obsidian (and maybe Loseq). And it appends some meta data in the file itself.

I personally felt this was unacceptable for my use case. And if Logseq’s android app wasn’t so bad, is be using it instead of Obsidian.

Was going to say the same. Obsidian has very little proprietary stuff in it, other than maybe some plugins users may elect to use. Other than that, it’s just folders full of markdown files.

I’ve tried 'em all. And I am always on the lookout for new apps that can do what I want. So far, Obsidian is the best.

• Joplin: adds meta data to your text files making it nearly impossible to find anything outside of Joplin unless you export

• Logseq: the closest substitute to Obsidian. The android app is almost unusable in my testing. And it’s an outlined based note app, so it requires a different mindset

• Silverbullet: such a neat project. The PWA runs great on every device I’ve tried it on. That said, I find it hard to navigate and will require more learning to take full advantage of its features

• Nextcloud Notes: decent if you already have an instance running. Not worth it just for Notes though. It’s very spartan, feature-wise

• Quillpad: the closest Google Keep alternative I’ve found so far. Does require Nextcloud insurance to sync though. At least currently.

• Acreom: very cool project. Similar to Obsidian and Logseq. Local first…unless you’re on mobile, then you are required to have an account and use their sync.

• Notesnook: has great features but does not store the notes on plain text (due to encryption), which is a deal breaker for my use case

• Memos: very easy to selfhost. Think of it like a personal twitter feed. Stores entries in a db file, so it’s out for me

I tested others, and many didnt last long enough in my testing to even be worth writing about. I find Obsidian’s folder hierarchy easier to fit around how my brain works. And the plain text files in folders, maintaining the hierarchy, is a killer feature for me. Lots of folks self host a sync solution. And I want to but am currently paying for their basic sync plan of $5/mo.

Source?

Miniflux is great. I use Wallabag as my read it later app and selfhost both on a cheap VPS. They’re tightly integrated but Miniflux supports several other integrations

Pop!_OS is neat. I’ve been running it on my desktop and laptop for over a year now. I like that it doesn’t look like Windows and has enough difference to it to not be a macOS clone either. Plus I think System76 is doing some great things with hardware design.

Notesnook? though I’m not sure about the collaborative features. You can password or fingerprint secure notes though. There is a free and paid tier so you’d have to test to see if the free tier does what you want. I’m on their paid plan due to a sale ($25/yr), so can’t remember which features are behind the paywall or not.

Yes. I just switched full time to Pop and I love it.

For those but happy with the $50/yr tier, I received a discount offer at the end of my premium trial. Ended up being $25 and I think it’s certainly worth that. That said, I’ll self host it as soon as it’s available.

Acreom is another in this segment of app that is very promising. It is not open source yet, but will be. And I do prefer the plain markdown file format of it and the likes of Obsidian compared to NN, but still a cool app.

I assumed you were asking what was wrong with the Joplin app, since that is what I was referring to in my post about awful android app. I use and love Obsidian on Linux, MacOS, and Android (tablet and phone). The only thing I don’t like about it along the lines of my original reply to you is that task lists and to-dos aren’t very easy or intuitive from Android. It’s doable, but kinda clunky. So for that type of scenario I’m using Quillpad.

But no, Obsidian app on Android is great. Joplin…nope. :)

I use checklists/task lists a lot. The way the app handles those are completely backwards. Checkbox is auto put in the title of the list but when you tap in the body of the list, it doesn’t. And the rendered view of your Todo list is very small with no way to change the font size. You can change the editor font size, but not on the rendered output.

I also don’t like to be required to put a title in at the start of any document. Other apps either name it ‘untitled’ or date/time it was created. This causes friction and if I can’t get my thought down quick, I may lose it.

That plus the whole markdown in a db file killed it for me.

You might look at these relative newcomers to this category of app…with some caveats for why I haven’t switched from Obsidian.

1. Acreom - Not open source yet, but planned. Flat markdown files like Obsidian and Logseq. Dealbreaker for me is that in order to use the app on Android, you have to sign in with Google, Apple, or Github and use their cloud for sync. I’m trying to convince the dev to allow their “local first” mantra to permeate all versions of the app regardless of platform. He is very receptive, so we’ll see. If they do, I can see myself switching to Acreom instead of continuing with Obsidian. But that’s the beauty of open file format, you can pack up and leave very easily!

2. Notesnook - Is FOSS. But not self-hostable yet. That is on their roadmap. Potential dealbreaker is that it doesn’t support markdown, rather shortcuts that behave similar to markdown syntax. As a result of that and their E2EE, the file format is not as open as Obsidian and others that use simple .md files.

…in a database file. That and the awful android app had me look elsewhere. Too bad really, FOSS and self host options with it are great.

Try RISC OS first. It won’t do what you’re asking for, but it’s a super neat vintage OS!

Oh, I’m running Pop!_OS so it’s running just fine. But like I said, I had it mixed up in my head that it was only e2, not their personal tier. But this is great. Thanks!

No worries at all. You just helped me make a decision. I’ve been an iDrive customer for years but recently switched to Linux for my primary OS and thought I was out of luck regarding the 5TB for $79/yr plan. So I’ll have to investigate further.

Wait…the scripts work for iDrive personal? For some reason I thought they were for the e2 storage.

Vampire Survivor. So cheap but fun to jump in for a run or six.