Obsidian - Note-Taking That Doesn't Suck

After burning through Evernote, Notion, Apple Notes, and about 12 other apps, I finally found something that doesn't suck. Obsidian launched in 2020 and fixed what drove me crazy about every other app: they all treat notes like isolated documents when your brain works by connecting everything.

Your Notes, Your Files, Your Rules

Here's what sold me: Obsidian stores everything as Markdown files on your computer. Not in some proprietary database that holds your thoughts hostage. Not in the cloud where they can disappear if a company goes under. Just plain text files you can open with any editor.

When I type [[Philosophy]] in a note about Descartes, Obsidian automatically creates a bidirectional link. Now my Descartes note shows up when I'm looking at philosophy, and vice versa. It's stupidly simple but somehow every other app fucks this up.

Privacy That Actually Works

I got burned by Evernote's security breaches and Notion's server outages. The final straw was Notion being down for 4 hours during a client presentation. With Notion and Roam, your thoughts live on someone else's computer. With Obsidian, they live on yours. No servers to get hacked, no companies reading your notes to train AI models, no surprise policy changes.

The privacy policy is refreshingly simple: "All data is saved locally on your device and is never sent to our servers." Obsidian's approach to reducing supply chain attack risks shows they actually think about security instead of just checking compliance boxes.

The offline-first design means I can work on a plane, in a basement, or during that inevitable internet outage. Meanwhile, my colleagues are staring at "No connection" error messages in their cloud apps. The sync service costs $4/month if you want it, but Dropbox works fine for free if you're not editing the same note on multiple devices at once.

The Plugin Ecosystem That Doesn't Suck

Most apps give you what they think you need. Obsidian gives you a platform and lets the community build what actually works. There are over 2,600 plugins because devs can actually build stuff instead of filing feature requests that die in some company's Jira backlog.

Dataview lets me query my notes like a database. Templater automates the tedious stuff. The Calendar plugin gives me daily notes without the bloat of a full calendar app. Kanban boards handle project management without forcing me into another app.

The API docs actually make sense, unlike most apps. The community plugins directory has proper code review, unlike browser extensions that are basically "ship it and see what breaks." When plugins do break with updates (and they will), the developer community usually fixes them within days.

The difference is modularity. I can add what I need and ignore the rest. Compare that to Notion, where you get databases whether you want them or not, or Apple Notes, where you get... well, not much of anything.

Graph View: Pretty But Mostly Useless

The graph view looks impressive in demos but becomes visual noise once you have more than 200 notes. It's a hairball of connections that tells you nothing useful about your actual knowledge structure. I turned it off after the first month when it crashed my laptop trying to render 500 connections at once.

That said, the local graph view (showing just the connections around one note) is actually helpful. It's like seeing the immediate neighborhood of an idea without the entire city's road network cluttering your view. The global graph? Pure eye candy unless you're doing very specific research with highly structured data.

Canvas: Finally, a Whiteboard That Doesn't Suck

Obsidian Canvas launched in late 2022 and finally gave us a whiteboard that doesn't eat 4GB of RAM for three sticky notes. It's an infinite space where you can drop notes, images, PDFs, even web pages and arrange them spatially. Unlike Miro or Figma, your content stays connected to your actual notes.

I use it for project planning when I need to see the big picture. Drop all the relevant notes onto a canvas, draw connections between them, add some images for context. When I update the underlying notes, the canvas updates too. It's particularly good for research synthesis when you need to map out how 15 different sources relate to each other.

The UI can be laggy with many elements, and the mobile experience is basically unusable, but for desktop brain dumps it's excellent. When Canvas inevitably eats all your RAM (and it will), just restart the whole damn thing. There's this memory leak that's been around since version 1.1.16 and nobody wants to fix it because it only affects Canvas power users. I've watched it consume 8GB of RAM on a 20-element canvas - absolutely ridiculous. The devs keep saying "we're looking into it" but it's been 8 months of this bullshit now.

Markdown: Your Notes Will Outlive the App

Obsidian stores everything in Markdown, which means your notes aren't trapped in some proprietary format. In 20 years, when Obsidian is as dead as Windows XP, you can still open your notes in any text editor.

This matters more than you think. I've lost notes to app shutdowns, format changes, and companies getting acquired. Markdown is just text with some formatting shortcuts. Every programmer knows it, every technical writer uses it, and it's not going anywhere.

MOCs: Solving the "Too Many Notes" Problem

Once you hit 500+ notes, you need Maps of Content (MOCs). These are index notes that organize related topics without forcing rigid hierarchies. Think of them as Wikipedia's main topic pages—they give you entry points into specific domains of knowledge.

I have MOCs for "Software Development," "Personal Finance," and "Book Notes." Each one links to the relevant notes in that area. It's like having subject-specific homepages that grow organically as you add more content.

The unlinked mentions feature is brilliant here. Obsidian automatically shows when you mention a topic without linking to it, helping you discover connections you missed.

Performance: It Actually Scales

I've got about 3,000 notes totaling 47MB now and Obsidian still opens in under 2 seconds on my 2021 MacBook Pro and searches in milliseconds - though it takes like 5 seconds on my shitty Windows work laptop. Compare that to Notion's sluggish performance, which takes 5 seconds to load a single page, or Evernote's heavy CPU usage, which chokes on large notebooks.

The secret is local processing. Everything happens on your machine instead of waiting for server round trips. The search is near-instant even with thousands of notes because it's just searching local files, not querying a database across the internet.

Performance tests show Obsidian handles 40,000+ notes without choking. Community reports back this up - people are running massive vaults without issues. Meanwhile other apps turn into molasses the moment you hit the cloud sync bottleneck.

That said, sync can be slow if you're using the official service with large vaults. Git works better for version history, and Dropbox is faster for simple sync, but you lose the fancy conflict resolution.