OPEN SOURCE alternatives to the MOST POPULAR productivity apps!
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- Опубліковано 3 тра 2024
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#Linux #OpenSource #apps
00:00 Intro
00:42 Sponsor: Try the new Thunderbird interface
01:35 Replace Obsidian
03:49 Replace Notion
06:40 Replace Teams and Slack
07:51 Replace Trello
09:24 Replace Acrobat Pro
10:33 Replace Visual Studio Code
11:47 Other alternatives
13:16 Sponsor: Get a PC made to run Linux
14:25 Support the channel
Obsidian offers the ability to link notes together, it uses markdown and plain text to store your notes, it has a plugin ecosystem, and the visual knowledge graph that lets you explore topics and the relationships between your notes. BUT it's proprietary, so we have Logseq. It takes notes as markdown files, it has more than 150 plugins, and a bunch of themes, it has mobile apps, it's private, and it does have the same linking features and knowledge graph.
It even lets you create queries to generate tables with all the information you need, based on the links and data you entered in your notes.Logseq even offers their own syncing solution if you want that. It's available for Linux, as an AppImage, and for macOS, Windows, iOS and Android.
Another really powerful app is Notion. While it's free of charge, it's also proprietary and doesn't have an official Linux version.
The closest thing you can find in the open source world will be AppFlowy, and while it's really close, it's not as feature complete just yet. You can create your own structure, with pages and subpages, and you have a few page types, like calendars, boards, tables, or documents. You also can mix these types on the same page, like having a board with cards, that you can also present in a table, or on a calendar, but you won't get as many templates as what Notion offers.
If you want a more full featured app, there's AnyType instead. It's also open source, and has a Linux client and mobile apps, but the interface is a bit more involved and less clear to start with than AppFLowy.
Now this one, you might not have as much control over, generally, a company or project will impose Slack or Microsoft Teams on you. But if you have all the power, then you might want to take a look at Mattermost.
It's a fully open source Slack / MS Teams alternative, that you can self host. It lets you create channels, and chat, with side threads, file sharing, screen sharing, and audio calls. It can be integrated with a bunch of developer tools to automate things, you can format messages with markdown, or code snippets, and all messages can be archived, with full history search.
If all you need to organize yourself is a board, you might use Trello. This one is pretty easy to replace: you can just use Focalboard. You can either self host it if you want to let multiple people access the same board, or you can just use it as a personal app, with a macOS, Windows and Linux application.
If you need to create and edit PDF documents, you might use Acrobat Pro, from Adobe. You can always open them in GIMP, Inkscape, of LibreOffice Draw, but these tend to either open a single page, or break the document's formatting. Libreoffice draw does a great job IF you have all the fonts used in the PDF installed on your system , but editing text is generally handled in a line per line basis, instead of recognizing things as paragraphs, which can be a pain to deal with.
Visual Studio Code's ... code is licensed under the MIT license, so it IS an open source / free software project, but the binary you can get from Microsoft isn't open source. The alternative, thus, is easy: VSCodium. It's built on the open source parts of VS Code, but removes all the tracking, telemetry and proprietary components. It's compatible with VS Code's plugins and extensions, and has the exact same interface and features, but in a nice open source form. - Наука та технологія
Try the new Thunderbird release: mzla.link/tb-flatpak, and don't hesitate to recommend some cool FOSS apps to replace proprietary alternatives!
VirtualBox for VMware!
Trillium Notes is something that could work better than Logseq for an obsidian alternative... just wanted to let you know... though it is a bit obscure due to only having a GitHub page.
Hope you have a great day & Safe Travels!
Mozilla Thunderbird is the best desktop email client IMO
That's so cool! I'm glad they sponsored your video.
Tell them to implement tray icons for flatpaks! Why something small like Flameshot can be minimized to tray and Thunderbird can't?
01:35 LOGSEQ
04:24 AppFlowy
06:59 Mattermost
08:04 Focalboard
09:49 LibreOffice Draw
10:53 VSCodium
Forgot thunderbird
Missing:
05:38 anytype
11:56 NextCloud
12:33 Thunderbird
I use LibreOffice to open PPTX and the results are different from when opened using MS Office, is there something wrong with my LibreOffice?
@@yukicodingCompatibility Issues.
No Solution.
VSCodium is not an alternative it's the core
Should start a “Replace with FOSS” hype similar to “rewrite in Rust” 😂
Unity situation has already caused a lot of movement towards open source game engines
@@katech6020 I hope they can discover more than just the engine, but get around with blender, krita, gimp...
@@Beryesa. I hope it is just the start of open source renaissance
Please let's not. The latter people are hella annoying
@@Beryesa. game engines often include tools to do these types of things (well, the highly integrated ones and it does have quite some advantages for the engine)
Krita for all those aspiring digital artists, you do not have to abuse free trials or pirate software to get a great drawing app
Also most likely a better alternative for people used to Photoshop. To give an example... Krita has non destructive effects and adjustment layer. These feature are really useful and are still missing in Gimp. It is one of the main reason why I left Gimp a while back.
Yes! Krita is incredible and it keeps getting better. As an artist, mostly painting, I can tell you your art will not be hindered at all by Krita, especially if you're not dependent on more arcane and hyperspecific features from other software. I'd say CSP is the only to beat it for lineart specifically since its optimisation for vector lineart is quite unmatched.
How does it handle animation compared to say Adobe Animate?
Or you can just, you know, buy software you use.
@@belphegor_tv he could buy indeed. That's just not the topic here.
It would be wonderful if Obsidian would be open source
Oh yezh
It's really the only minus to obsidian. it's not even enough to make me want to move to logseq, but I'd love if they made this move. I don't see why not. They aren't monetizing the app itself.
@@meowculaI believe the developers spoke about it. I don't recall if their reasoning was a temporarily issue or a permanent one. I'll look it up later.
At the point where Obsidian is it just feels more of a feelgood thing than anything, given their emphasis on easily digestible and usually human readable formats, eschewing VC funding. They're stable and you own your data, and the lock-in is really the bigger problem in most software than source availability. Logseq's Markdown flavor is also less standard than Obsidian's, which hews closer to the original format designed for blogging / prose.
That said, Logseq is good (or, at least will be once they get their sync in order) but a dedicated outliner is a pretty different beast from Obsidian's more document-oriented approach.
I really hope Logseq gets their sync together since I like outliners more, but atm it just feels a little too shoddy for my taste.
If I remember correctly, it was open source but since everybody copy Obsidian to resell it they decided to make it proprietary. (Again I'm not sure) They said they will make it open-source if they stop the development
Accesibility request: Show notes should include the list of software and respective links you are recommending. Sometimes is hard to understand the name of the software you are talking about. Mentioning the name more than once and having the names in text on the screen would help too.
Hell yea
Absolutely. I don't have time to rewatch videos. I don't even have time to master my main apps let alone new apps. I've never learned how to use blender, let alone all the apps he mentioned here.
Sejda for PDFs since he didn't mention anything helpful for PDFs. You're welcome.
The best pdf editor! Highly recommend Sejda as well. Nobody else has the splitting features
Gimp, being one of the only open source, raster photo editor out there. It is still behind in UI in years. Photoshop have been improving every iteration. Yet Gimp still feels like it is a software from 2007 coming out with Ubuntu.
There is Krita too, its open source with good Ui
Krita is more drawing software and not photo-editor. It have a lot of features, yeah, but not as much as PS@@manoyal
@@manoyal My only problem with Krita is the horrendous text editing. If it wasn't for that, I'd probably have stopped using Clip Studio Paint ages ago.
Honestly not only In UI.... It's decades behind in many other areas too sadly. The lack of filter-layers being an obvious one.
That's most of the OSS in general, almost as if the devs are proud to have something looking like it came out 20 years ago just as long as it's free.
I was waiting during half of the video to get to an alternative for Acrobat, and he just said edit the original non-pdf file 😂
This is the way.
pdf editing programs really only make sense as reorganizers in case you want to combine, separate pages or alter their order and orientation, then change some minor things like the angle of an image etc, otherwise it is always more convenient to just edit the original. The free editor program he suggested can do this, so there's that.
yep... disappointing...
@@cdgonepotatoes4219yeah, I had no idea when people talk about "editing" PDFs they really do mean doing all the stuff that's much easier to do in a word processor or a desktop publisher. I always thought they meant the things that I want to do with PDFs beyond reading and printing them, which is fill forms (or maybe free form annotation) and split/merge/reorganize.
A PDF should be the digital equivalent of a paper document. You can shuffle pages around, you can write on top of it, but if you want to change the actual content, go back to the source.
@@tparadox88 Agree. I also thought the point was to fill forms and create fillable forms, redact lines, split/merge/organize, insert signature, annotate with pen, etc.
Nice! Basically the alternative for Acrobat Pro is... not editing PDFs! Great suggestion Nick 🙂
It also doesn't address the need for turning PDFs into fillable forms.
i have heard lebara office draw is a good option for pdf but i have never used it
I also heard of pdf24. Never used as I personal have never had the need to do anything in pdf, other than open, read, blackout and print.
Don't know if anyone has used this that could share some thoughts?
@@andrewdunning4295oh, pdf24 is just awesome. I don't particularly use it a lot for editing (didn't know it was even possible) but to turn pictures into native pdfs, merge, rearrange, separate pdfs, etc., it's great. You become used to it really quick
@@gauravkaushik2822 I've used it and it is not good filling PDF documents. It may be good for creating them but I dont think that most people are looking for a tool to change graphical PDFs like he showed in the video...
I know gimp is a photo editing rather than image creation, but the lack of ability to easily draw primitive shapes is surprisingly restrictive. Personally I like the OS agnostic, browser-based, photopea
Gimp never bothered me with that, tbh.
I do have issues with the lack of CMYK support and that if you select to make circles it looks shitty, but when you do the same thing with vectors it looks great.
@@enkiimuto1041there is active development for the color space and it will be part of the upcoming 3.0 version. However it is "when its done" release.
@@guss77 I'll check it out, ty
Have you tried Affinity Designer? it's not open source nor free but it's one time payment with updates (actual real updates)
Many people use photshop as what actually was meant to be illustrator. I was watching another day a *professional* designer create a flyer entirely on photoshop and at some point he even mentioned he doesn't even know how to use illustrator properly. Adobe is obviously aware of how people use their app and has been making photoshop more and more directed towards design related stuff. Gimp however is almostly entirely restricted to image manipulation and probably always will be. It's the same for Inkscape, krita and blender. They probably will never get as bloated as photoshop/adobe. They only will succeed if people change their mindset around "one app to rule them all".
We need to find a way for open source developers to profit from their applications, other Ads, and keeping with the idea of privacy and freedom.
Joplin is also an excellent choice for note-taking! It allows me to sync between all my devices easily via S3.
yes, but it has nothing to do with notion or obsidian, really
I second Joplin. Integrates with my Nextcloud server, giving me markdown notes on all my devices. Very cool app.
@@mat_max Jolpin has alo note link system any many feature, that obsidian has, but easy to lean, nice folder strukture for beginners and end-2-end end encryption. Use use joplin for 2 years and I'. very satisfying. Obsidian has a little more feature, linke Excalidrav-Linking, really nice, but for me Joplin is enough and has a very good export (md. html,pfd) and import (enex,txt,html) For example you can export all markdownfile and simply use the folder a obsidian vault.
Do you have any video tutorial I don't know how to sync through Android version?
@@mat_maxwhat do you mean, they're all note taking/knowledge base apps...
this sponsor was actually helpful :D not long ago (a few months) I looked for a good mail client. Thunderbird in its old state was damn near my vision but lost against bluemail. The big thing i missed was the card view. Just with your video, I found out that there was a big update :D Thank you
The vscodium store has honestly gotten a long way. Like 1 or 2 years ago there was basically none of the extensions that most devs were using but now the important extensions are all there
I know it's Microsoft's fault, but I really miss wsl integration in vscodium, I had to install vscode just for that in my work laptop, sadly.
Sadly, the remote extension only works on vscode. Since I work on servers, having a fast remote IDE is a massive time saver.
@@KnightRiderOfVoid i mean if you use Windows, Microsoft gets your data anyway so it doesn’t really make a difference for that
I can still use microsoft extensions in vscodium. all you have to do is transfer extension files from .vscode to .vscode-oss. but ya it means both vscode and vscoidum needed to be installed.
@@gigalodon14 to some extent
The issue I personally have with Logseq is that you can't use a folder structure like in Obsidian which gives you the option to do so. A better open source alternative (desktop only) for me at least would be Zettlr. It doesn't have the graph view thing, but if you don't use it Zettlr is pretty good. Also uses local markdown files which you decide how you want to sync.
Did you also try QOwnNotes?
Joplin lets you have hierarchical notebooks and it has mobile apps too, it doesn't keep your notes as files (it uses a database to speed up searches) but it does let you sync using pretty much any popular method you can think of
Edit: oh and there's a plugin for the graph view thing too (though it's a couple of years old and might be abandoned by the dev unfortunately, it's still functional but a bit janky in places)
@@Imperial_Squid Joplin looks horrible 😂
In my personal case for notes taking and as a replacement for obsidian I just go with Joplin, is way simpler in a lot of stuff but it works and it can look very pretty too.
Also it can sync with my nextcloud storage so I have the notes in all my devices :)
Joplin is pretty good, yeah!
I hate the lead dev of Joplin but I still use it a bit. I requested git sync support like they have in GitJournal, but with the features of Joplin.
Some of us even gave ready to use implementations, but the dev said "we dont't have the resources to do that or the time", which I thought was fair at the time, but then they started their own cloud offering, implementing a server from scratch and everything, so yeah, they just don't want you to have git or version control outside their offering, is not about complexity, resources or time, they just don't want you to have the option. They offer mostly private cloud sync ot their own, they don't want to delegate control.
I know, open source and bla, bla, bla. I know enough coding to semi evaluate projects and read basic stuff, I don't have the knowledge to create the thing myself and send a PR for the git support. Also they said that if someone implement that but did not take the maintenance of that "plugin", they would exclude it in future versions because they don't care about it and will not maintain it, even if they get the implementation for free.
Yeah, a selfish prick if you ask me, but others will disagree saying that it's open source and you know the rest.
It's a shame, but what can be done if you are not a coder... I use GitJournal and keep some notes in Joplin for the extra features, but offline because will not upload my notes to Microsoft or Dropbox servers. 🤷♂️
Joplin is great, especially with some plugins. With that said their phone version is... less than desirable, SimpleNote is way better.
Joplin is great. Also, although you could just sync notes through your Nextcloud on a filesystem level, it even has integrated Nextcloud syncing.
I tried Joplin for quite some time but got extremely upset with its editor. Its use of shortcuts is a very strange mix of vim & Emacs & normal "Windows-like" keys (e.g. copy-pasting), and it bumps me to the mouse way more often than Obsidian. In fact, I tried Joplin before I ever tried Obsidian, and I was so upset about it getting in my way that I was ready to completely dump Joplin & going back to only using Emacs with plain Markdown (= without all the comfort the other apps use). I love that Joplin exists, though. People should give it a try.
Focalboard is made by the same people of Mattermost, and intergrated Mattermost deployments have the boards features built in. (Use it at work, it's fine)
Is focalboard still supported? It doesn't appear to be from what I see on github.
Another important one to mention is rust-analyzer+VSCodium as an alternative to RustRover. This combination is what I used to initially follow (and subsequently diverge from) Philipp Oppermann’s Rust kernel tutorial.
This video was really useful for me. Hopefully you'll do a refresh every year or so. Thanks for the recommendations!
This is one of the most useful videos you'vre recently produced. If you can do more like it, that would be fantastic!
This is such an informative video!! There were THREE switches I’m considering after watching this
6:32 I checked the CSS. The serif font they use is actually TS Riccione, which is adapted from Times New Roman.
Apple's old "Think Different" font was a variant of ITC Garamond called Apple Garamond.
Well, it looks really similar and has the same vibes :)
This is exactly the kind of videos I need, once you settle on a distro (which I've yet to achieve) apps becomes your next step
For obsidian, there is also Zettlr! I don't think it includes a graph, but I've never used that, and it's great for a journal.
Or Tiddlywiki ! With backlinks
Does Zettlr's website version support dark theme? My repo has one only with white themes =/
@@enkiimuto1041 I believe so? It's there on the fedora repo install and the windows website one. It's under General, a dark mode toggle (near the top), not in appearance/display though (in the settings)
@@enkiimuto1041use Dark Reader to get dark mode websites everywhere, it'll automatically figure out a good colour scheme for you and handles 99% of websites perfectly!
I never heard of Obsidian before, and after seeing it deomnstrated and described I still have no idea what it is or what it does. Anyway, great that you're continuing to spread the word on open source alternatives.
You should really check out obsidian and if you have never heard of backlinking and Zettlekasten you are sure gonna get into a rabbit hole though
It's just an inline previewing Markdown editor where you open an entire folder (the apps usually call this a vault or a graph) and can do eg. searches over the entire folder and refer to other [[pages]] easily. Importantly: Every page gathers every link to itself in a list so you can eg. do journaling workflows like:
* [[Meeting]] with [[WaterShowsProd]] and [[Nick]] on [[macOS]]
* notes
* notes
* notes
And the page named Meeting will gather up a list of all your meetings that you can then filter further. The page will only show those parts of the bullet list that mention the meeting. Similarily, if I previously had notes like:
[[Nick]] has great segues... to today's sponsor
Both that and the meeting notes would show up either under Nick's page (Roam Research, Logseq, Amplenote, optionally Obsidian) or in a sidebar (Obsidian default).
You can build out content about topics from sporadic observations without specifically constructing an article and logkeeping becomes quite easy. The backlink concept is useful enough that even apps that aren't built around the function like Evernote and Notion have implemented basic solutions for it.
These apps also handle stuff like attachments nicely: I can paste an attachment to an Obsidian page and it'll store the attachment to a separate Attachments folder and wikilink it in the textfile. Shows up inline as expected, but keeps the files plain and in the filesystem.
These apps also let you run custom small query languages to trawl through your notes and build database-ish live views of stuff in your vault, somewhat Notion-like.
It helps you edit, organise, and search plain-text notes with hyperlinks and the ability to embed notes inside each other. It's a very good markdown editor and has lots and lots of plugins. Pretty good
It's a markdown editor that supports connecting your markdown files via links between each other and has a lot of other extensions to use it for note taking
Think of Obsidian as your personal notes Wikipedia. You write ideas in markdown, then you can link those notes together. You can also pull a view of notes into other notes. And you can output notes in different formats.
This is the hardest I've been click baited in a long time, I clicked SO fast seeing the Acrobat logo in the thumbnail [because I've been on a hunt for a GOOD program I didn't have to sell my kidney for to make editable "forms" for digital downloads + assets for freelance projects that people can edit themselves after the fact with little to no knowledge on editing softwares/etc] only for him to talk about annoyances from a few half-alternatives then to be like jUsT dONt LuL ..... i'm legit so sad, i thought this was gonna be the best part of my day lmfao
"But why would you wanna do 'that'?" A bona fide classic in the world of software support.
Love it!! Thank you very much for this video! Please with your amazing work and also this kind of content.
PS: open source alternatives for note apps (Apple Notes, OneNote or Google Keep) and for tasks?
I’ll switch from vs code to vs codium tomorrow (unless some critical extension is missing). I like the settings sync features (this I how I setup my IDE at work, temporarily log in with my personal account let it sync, log out, log in with work account).
As I like to do things way more complicated than necessary. I split my nextcoud instance over 4 docker constainers. Database, Webserver, php-Server, Collabora code server.
This was very useful! I just downloaded some of them! Thank you!
A cool alternative for VSCode is LiteXL
Lightweight (30Mb of RAM usage), less clutter, true personalization (even the menu) and can have all the basic feature with a few extensions
ok, but visual studio? (not code)
@@marijuslapinskas1709what about it? Two very different software
We used to utilize skype to communicate between the observatories around europe for VLBI projects (ya know, big ass antennas observe one target to emulate bigger antenna observing this target).
We moved to mattermost and it is generally better.
Skype has been a shadow of its former self ever since Microsoft bought them. I don't know why I even keep my account, I should have deleted it years ago
for me and my workflow, PDF Arranger is a must in every linux/windows installation
Many years ago when the TV show Heroes was on the air, the network would release a mini digital comic each week on their website. I was using a freeware PDF viewer, and after the first couple issues, each comic would have a normal sized cover, but all the pages would display at the size of a postage stamp. I used a simple PDF editor (pirated) to open the files and found that the image size had been set much smaller than the page size. I changed them to match and this fixed the problem.
I don't mean to sound like an expert at PDF editing. I really had no idea what I was doing when I started, and there were THREE different sets of X and Y setting that affected how the pages displayed. I just changed them all to match the title page.
Since its 1.2 version with page management, Inkscape has really become the best pdf editor (with it's internal import method, not the poppler one). Unlike OoDraw, it draws unknown fonts fine until you have to edit the text. So for a simple layout rework / adding a signature... it does a great job.
not just a pdf editor, but a great replacement to adobe illustrator as well
Will Inkscape password-lock a PDF? My place-of-work could really use a replacement app after major issues at OS level with Adobe's licensing app.
@@nickalotdegit you can do this as well as simple repaging with pdftk (multiplatform)
@@G1vr1x W00p! TY.
Personally I'm a fan of Evolution for email/calendar/tasks but the rest are all solid options. Thunderbird do be looking nice now though...
I was among the first open alpha Anytype users and am extremely glad to see it mentioned.
It’s really good! After the video, I started implementing a system in it to try and use it as my main content production app!
Same
Same, but just today I was on some spotty wifi and was losing data as I was typing it out. I am on the latest build so using the new anysync backend. I think I am going back to Obsidian, not as pretty but the simplicity of plain text etc is appealing.
I installed it and then did a little research. They don't really use GPL. Their developers are mostly from Russia - they don't show their location so they might be still living there. So I rather use something else.
@@new-lviv They are in Germany now but there is nothing wrong with folks from Russia or living there. To be clear war is never the answer.
We need an open source like Canva that has multiple art boards in a vertical fashion known as pages can remove backgrounds and do basic image manipulation of contrast brightness export and batch or one at a time. While there are too many templates to ever expect a one-to-one at least template canvas sizing shouldn't be too much of a problem
Self-hosted Mattermost is a PitA. It's migration and upgrades are a headache (i.e. occasionally there are unfixable bugs forcing you to revert to the previous version/platform).
LibreDraw is only sometimes usable. Scenario from last week: one of my colleagues asked me for a way to export some data from a PDF file. LibreDraw couldn't open that file at all, while other PDF tools had no problem at all.
This video is a keeper. I am going to have to re-watch it and download and try a lot of this software.
Using more and more open source apps, this will help the developers to have better apps. And we need to contribute.
Greetings, excellent video. Could you please make a video of an office setup entirely in Linux. It's like this video but more. Taken to practice. Thank you
Evolution is also very usable and stable now (as opposed to some years ago). I use both - Evolution and Thunderbird, as strange as it may sound. Keeping Thunderbird just in case, as I rely on email.
Enjoyed watching this ad! Glad to see thunderbird still out there.
I like these videos about nice applications. Just nice to see what's out there. I'm a creature of habits and sometimes forget there are better tools available then what my boss offers me.
Always great videos! Thanks! Thunderbird seemed so abandoned, it is good to see it having new life! Also I find it funny how people say "mainstream" this and that. I worked and lived with linux for years. Had a colossal hard time going back to windows for work and I would prefer Linux any day of the week. Once you get rid of the bloat, you realize how much simple many of the things we do can be.
I was working on Linux for 2.5 years. The best experience.
Man you are THE LINUX GUY for me, thanks for open source suggestions
This is some productive video, amirite?
Jokes aside, this is very nice video for people looking to switch to Linux and would be good to see another compilation like such but for other categories!
vscode is nice, and codium is pretty much 1 to 1 already. but i still feel that it is a bit too slow for my tastes, especially with larger projects (plus i just got a rendering bug with vscode). i am hoping for lapce/zed to be in full feature some day
such a shame that zed beta is only for macos :(
@@rakandhiyaaa92 really is a shame. but we should give them time. for now i continue with vscode on markdown projects and lapce for all my new work. for some reason markdown plugins are terrible on lapce
Have you tried KATE? It's a fully-open source text editor with most/all the features of VS Code, while being less-memory intensive as it is written in CPP & QT instead of using Electron frameworks like VS Code, has lots of plugins and a split-screen view like in KDE's "Konsole". There is also KDevelop (and KDevHelp) which is a fully-featured FOSS IDE that can replace Visual Studio, XCode and others so long as you only plan on developing terminal or QT applications and of course both programs are cross-platform and KATE at least could theoretically run on Android if you compile the code for that platform...
One is the NT kernel
i replaced it 3 years ago completley with the linux kernel thats licensed under the gpl and i love it
The bsd os is a fully-built alternative! It's not viable yet tho
@@conduitstruct i know
@@hannescampidell I was trying to play along lol
Okular is good if you want a simple PDF viewer with some basic highlighting functions (e.g. highlighting)
Incredible video! Thank you for your work!
Another recommendation as an alternative for Obsidian would be Trilium. It is open-source, free software and supports many of the features of Obsidian in terms of note linking and Markdown support.
It also has programmability in Javascript and a ton of examples on the web site and embedded in the Demo/default content.
The big difference is that it doesn't store notes as individual Markdown files but as a SQLite database. They have a server component which allows local installs to sync each other across the LAN or Internet. It's actually super-simple to deploy, even without Docker.
I'm.a huge fan and use it daily to take notes and track progress.
Storing notes in a binary format defeats the purpose of using markdown. Might as well parse them further into the database and use more feature rich format for the text, like odt or something
This, Trilium is great, this was the final app that convinced me as OneNote alternative, anything else just wouldn’t cut it
@@NJ-wb1cz It's still Markdown, making it easy to export, and it's in a standard format/database, so you still maintain a level of data sovereignty.
I agree that it's a different architecture that isn't for everyone, which is why I mention that along with comparing it's functionality to Obsidian.
@@nosbig98 yeah, until your db gets corrupted or you want to constantly sync a 10 gb database to several devices over dropbox without having to host a server or you want to use several apps to edit the same notes
There's a reason why markdown notes app like obsidian and logseq work that way instead of just jamming everything into a db. It's a conscious decision that makes all the difference in data safety, convenience, and functionality
@@NJ-wb1cz Wow. I'm in IT and have been for decades... I don't personally need the lecture about the benefits of a flat-file data structure. One of the many reasons I gave run Debian for 20 years is precisely because the packaging databases are all flat text files.
I highlighted the different architecture of Trilium so people could make that conscious choice. Trilium does do in-app automatic database backups on a daily, weekly, and monthly backup. And aside from that, folks should also know to perform their own system backups.
Again, I am not knocking the approach that Obsidian is taking or your choice in how you wish to operate. But that doesn't mean that it's the only right answer, it just fits your requirements.
I wish you the best of times with Obsidian, and I hope that folks will take the time to understand the variety of choices available to them and make the best choice for their situation.
If I am at my Linux machine, I use Evolution to reach the corporate's Office 365 suite (e-mails, calendar, etc) very handy stuff almost as good as Exchange...
sadly Evolution doesn't support Office365 Two-Factor Authentication (2FA/MFA)
Evolution is better, as the a bit outdatet look sugest.. but why evolution cant start minimized in the background on bootup? thats anoying
neat suggestsions, which it was easier to see what the app you're recommending in the section you're talking about, was skipping around to see it was mattermost :), good video
Thanks for the suggestions!
I'm very wary of Anytype because their software isn't actually open source, instead it is source available and there's a whole vibe about how they present themselves that for some reason I don't really like.
Still it's very interesting and a little less bad than full-on proprietary options at least
Their developers are from Russia. God knows if they are not in Russia now working remotely and what are their political views.
@@new-lvivYes, developers from Russia and in their official telegram channel they ban any who writes about bugs and some Ukrainian people (not sure about all, bu I know some people)
Just in time😅 I am in the process of searching and installing open source apps to prepare the shift into Linux😂
Cool sponsor man! I love Thunderbird :) Great video as well as always, you're the best. Greeting from Argentina!
Thanks for the kind words 😁
Does the obsidian alternative have an excalidraw equivalent?
Like does the whiteboard have pen support?
Imagine using Acrobat when you can use the superior LaTex.
For me editing PDF isn't about editing the contents of it, but rearranging pages, adding empty ones, merging PDFs into one. So far I haven't found a good open source alternative.
Most distros I've used have PDF Arranger available. For what you are describing as PDF editing, it works well to me for those tasks. Unless I just haven't noticed, I think you would have to create an "empty page" pdf in libreoffice, or anywhere else you can make a pdf, that you could drag into position to do the "add empty page" task. I don't believe there is a function to add a new page to the document, just import PDF docs, delete pages, move pages around. Hope it helps!
I use a ton of FOSS applications, and I love them.
Bless you and salute you! This video incorporates so much useful information! So much appreciated 👍
Please add a text title of the alternative application for more than a few seconds.
It is difficult to find the moment you name the alternative, but the original app is named in the chapter title.
Obsidian is such a good app I'm even considering paying for it one day alongside making donations to blender, krita and other apps I use a lot when I get my own money, Obsidian is just a really cute interface to create plaintext files and the valt is just a folder
Me too. I just wish they have pricing that adapts to the country your in
In VSCodium, you can actually switch to Microsoft's proprietary extension store by editing few lines in the config file.
Then why not just use regular vscode?
@@mvevitsis because of the removed telemetry
@@mvevitsis Maybe less telemetry? The MS extensions will still track you tho.
@@GamersUniverseOE if you install the MS extensions then yes, but you may need to download 3rd party extension that isn't on the FOSS extension store, but it doesn't have to track you.
Siyuan can be an alternative for obsidian though it doesn't store files as markdown but can export as markdown
Emacs & Vim (or Neovim) should still be the suggested editor route for many tho. VS Codium still has the evil corporation controlling the source & project direction even if the base is open (think Google still controlling Chromium).
Also, since LSP is an open standard, all language servers for VSCode (intellisense) work on vim/nvim/etc and provide the same level of static analysis
I am a big neovim advocate, but many people don't want to take the time to get into it. For them, codium is still better then vscode at least.
focalboard is not actively worked on by the core developers anymore and there are over 600 issues.
Thunderbird 🥳🥳, the redesign is really nice and totally convinced me to switch from Evolution! Haven't looked back!
It's nice to see our good old friend Thunderbird doing well.
I don't use email often but when I do I use Thunderbird 🐦🦅
Sad that Joplin Note has fallen behind as a replacement for Evernote when Logseq is looking great in comparison. I don't want to switch right now but it's looking like a bit of a game changer for me.
Also thank you for mentioning Codium! I feel like nobody knows about it yet. Maybe that's also a good thing as far as Microsoft is involved, but whatever.
I never recommend GIMP as a Photoshop alternative. GIMP works great as a general picture editor, it doesn't handle text very well. As a former Photoshop professional, I personally found that Krita is closer in features, as well as handles text, has a better animation system, and a wide variety of brushes.
Yup, I want to second this. my sister who is an artist exclusively uses Krita
Inkscape is my go-to for vectors and text (like adobe illustrator)
All good suggestions! Will have to try a few.
I've been looking for a Trello replacement!
Thank you, this video is very helpful.
the only thing i don't like about BOTH obsidian and logseq is they are both electron apps. i don't need a whole instance of a stripped down chrome running when i'm writing my silly little stories, and i find i don't utilize most of what obsidian upsells itself for. what i've been looking for is more of a native ulysses clone. on that front i know of thiefMD (but i don't really like adwaita apps), ghostwriter (has a useless sidebar imo, i want a filetree there) and kate, maybe?
Logseq is for making semantic connections in your notes, not for writing prose. I am writing impressions about the books I read there and it shows how they are connected when I add a markup - that's very simple to do in Logseq.
Did you try QOwnNotes?
Replace unity with Godot! 😂
Always with great very unique videos, thanks!
Great tips. Great Alternatives. Thank you for including all the apps. Really helps
Mattermost is an absolute pain in the neck for teams about 1000 employees and larger. Both server side and client become mostly unusable when the team size approaches to that limit.
Can you explain, what is unusable? Freeze?
Obsidian's markdown system has to be the most headache inducing thing on the planet. If only there was a good open-source Notion alternative.
We need mode videos like this.
Really, the king of video what I'm searching since long long time. Thanks. 🙏
The newest versions of Thunderbird are a massive improvement. It still feels kinda clunky compared to outlook though. But prior to that it felt like it was neglected by Mozilla for a very long time. So hopefully they'll be giving it more attention.
And here I am, hating the new UI with a passion.
Really? I have never been able to use outlook. It's such a mess, everything seems to be thown at the window without much thought, and of the 1000 features it has, most of the time just get in the way and allow old school tech illiterate users to keep doing things the wrong way in email (attachments, formatting, pop accounts with insanely big PSTs, etc).
Is it just me?
Used logseq and last two years didn't move from obsidian. I think obsidian reached in a level where competition stops. The main feature is you can mold it bend it customize it without limit to match your workflow, logseq force you to stick to their note taking norm mentality where as obsidian let you shape the app how things will go.
Maybe you can help me here:
I've only heard good things about Obsidian, people love it and so on. So I installed it, and then I sat there and didn't know what to do. Do you have to be some kind of programmer or dev to really make use of it? Because I am not. Does it have some use for the regular Joe who dabbles a bit in self-hosting and uses mostly calendar, email and gaming related tasks?
@@ancogaming you don't have to be a programmer to use obsidian, just think it as your personal note book in papers where you will write whatever you want, every new note is a new page of your journal or diary in papers. if you decide to write down what you want to do daily and keep track of them just like in paper, a lot of plugins available to serve your specific needs, you have played or watched a game trailer and want to write sort few lines about the game? When you realize your vault or home folder is in a mess of 100 of pages you will organize them in folders. No rules here to impose, do organize them as you like. The real power comes with linking all the notes. Imagine you have an idea to stream one of the game you watched earlier. Quickly create a note and write down your idea and linked them to the previously created note of the game.
I know it's sound all fuzzy, use it for sometimes.. I am sure you will find your way. Good watch "build with Ben" obsidian series and "nick Milo linking your thinking" you will get the core foundation of obsidian, and then decides how it can fit into your life.
The way I setup is minimalistic, and very complex at the same time. I am working on personal digital garden website which will directly take my notes and converts them to website pages. And bunch of other modification I have done to personalized my way of taking notes. Like weekly notes and goal and percentage completion of the week, shopping list and tracks of habits, learning stuff and bookkeeping.
You can start very thin and lean and grow as you need.
@@ancogaming You can use it as a Journal or to keep Notes. It's like MS Word, but without all the toolbars, heavy UI, rulers, margins, Clippy, etc. from MS Office. UI is centered on the text for simple editing. So if you just want to note things down, and you just want to mostly bold, underline, italicize, bullet text, list, number, Indent and other simple editing, you can just use Keyboard or Hidden shortcuts.
@@ancogaming If you already have a note taking practice or a workflow management routine that works for you, that's totally fine! Keep it up and dont feel the need to integrate Obsidian into your daily life or workflow. It's nothing special. It's not a calendar app, it's not a task management app, it's not a word processor or something like excel.
However, I have this example for the benifet of those who wish to try it out.
Create a new note and rename it from "Untitled" to "Masterlist"
This can be named anything, really, but this demonstrates Obsidian's only unique feature it has the best.
Create another note and use it for anything you want. (Today's grocery list, or 5 cool things i saw today, quotes from favorite authors, or whatever) For this example, you can start with putting a dash ( this - icon ) and list a few things. It will parse the dashes as markdown and format it into bullet points for you.
Create another note, or a few, if you like. I made a "practice note" where i practiced simple markdown formatting, using asterisks for bold, underscores for italic, and hash tags for headings. Markdown is really fun and simple.
You can also create another note called "helpful links" for reference links for obsidian, like the obsidian forum, the obsidian documentation website, some kind of markdown cheat sheet page, etc, etc. You just need to paste in these links from a browser like you would with a text document.
Notes are nothing special, It's all about how they're useful to you and how you want to use them. you just need a few for this example.
Go back to the "Masterlist" note and tap the left open square bracket twice. A drop down list should appear, and you should be able to select one of the previous notes you created. Once you do, it will be come a clickable link to that note. When you click to that note, you can do the same thing, if you wanted, and have it link back to the Masterlist note.
You can add whatever notes you feel are relevant into this masterlist using this method.
When you click on Graph View, you can see the link displayed between your linked notes.
That's it, that's the magic trick. That's all Obsidian does. As you write notes, and as you link them together, you can navigate between them quickly. And the only thing different that Obsidian does from other apps is that it has the Graph View, where you can see the relationship your notes have with each other and how they're relevant. You can also label notes with tags, and those can be seen in the graph view also if you wanted.
Notes can be considered Ideas, and tags can help define the context for those ideas. Linking notes together is kind of like linking ideas together. Sorting them into folders is like sorting ideas into a project. To me, it feels like the digital version of pinning sticky notes to a corkboard and tying string between them.
@@ancogamingI use it for note taking in various subjects. Make short notes on concepts I'm studying and link to other related notes. So have notes on various programming languages, math and stats, or random thoughts and things I find interesting. I'm even using it to outline a fantasy novel I hope to write some day. The great thing about obsidian is linking or connecting the notes.
I use Xournal for editing PDFs like adding signature and filing in forms
This is genuinely SO useful. Thank you SO MUCH
i hope Codium will get mentioned :o
yay :D
😁😁
Problem with most OpenSource is that they don't focus on user experience
that's a huge help for replacing notion! thank you, this is why i'm subbed to you :)
One of VSCode alternative could be Lapce. It's still on early stage of development, but really potential code editor.
ok, but visual studio? (not code)
I use Okular for pdfs
@@ivanhoang2726 didn't knew, will take a look
@ivanhoang2726 looks like a Windows only PDF viewer, Okular are in both Windows and Linux
i have 3 beefs with logseq failing to replace Obsidian: worse stability, much less flexibilty (all docs are outlined by default, tabs and tiles are via plugins and or messed up) and infinitely inferior Excalidraw plugin. Nothing beats Obsidian+ Excalidraw to me. After few minutes / hours of setting up and learning where # / and [ is on my keyboard i'm combining plain markdown text and line art drawings auto saved in raster AND vector format with names in "YEAR-MONTH-DAY + custom name or parent note name".
Basically i write and draw in the same place and don't risk getting locked in.
Another great alternative to Trello is Planka, but it can only do kanban boards
That was really informative, thanks
During the whole video I was expecting that Nick will mention Kate as an alternative to VS Code (:
For me it's not enough to have an MS product but without a telemetry, I don't want to depend on this company in my workflow at all. Also VS Code being an Electron app constantly using the CPU and consumes the energy. I'm trying to use as more native apps as possible to get the most out of the battery.
The problem with those OSS 'alternatives' is that they all fall way behind proprietary sofware. Quite often, 'almost' is good enough, but in many cases it's not.
The company I working for transitioned from plain email to slack as a result of the covid19 pandemic, but then quickly hit the extremely annoying limit of 10000 messages (now 3 months) retaining, but paying for the shear size of our company launched the cost up by way above what we could accept. So, we moved to mattermost, and self-hosting it isn't even that hard as they provided you with a turn key docker compose file already. If you know how to docker compose up, you know how to host yourself a mattermost.
For PDF replacement, I’d recommend rather streamline and automate PDF creation from your preferred tools for document editing.
Having a “publish” step to create/update documents can streamline a number of different tasks related to the publication:
- create/update the PDF.
- perform any distribution/notifications linked to the document.
- publish to different targets with different formats. E.g. online publication is usually better served as HTML than PDF.