What is your favourite open source software that you discovered in the past year, that you can no longer live without?

Mine is Local Send which is a FOSS alternative similar to air drop that works across a variety of devices.

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Notesnook.
I was previously using Obsidian, which is great! but didn't like that it was closed source. I then went on to try various options [0] but none of them felt "right". I eventually found notesnook and it hit everything I was looking for [1]. It's only gotten better in the last year I started using it and just recently they introduced the ability to host your own sync server, which is one of the requirements it didn't initially make, but was on their roadmap.
[0] Obsidian, Standard Notes, OneDrive, VSCode with addons, Joplin, Google Keep, Simple Notes, Crypt.ee, CryptPad (more of a collabroation suite, which I actually really like, but it did not fit the bill of a notes app), vim with addons, Logseq, Zettlr, etc.
[1] Requirements in no particular order:
Open source client and server.
Cross-platform availability as I use Windows, Linux, Mac, and Android.
Cross-platform feature parity.
Doesn't fight me over how notes should be taken - looking at Logseq's lack of organization.
Easy notes syncing.
End-to-end encryption (E2EE). It's about to be 2025, if the tools you're picking up aren't E2EE, you're letting unknown strangers access your data and resell it. It doesn't matter what their privacy policy says as that can always change and/or they can get compromised/compelled to expose your data.
Ability to publish notes.
Decent UX.
- Lol love the use of references. So glad you posted this. Looks fantastic.
- I am using Logseq and the organization is basically the only thing not working for me. I will try this out.
  
  I really tried making Logseq work for me but even if they added some kind of organization/hierarchy, I still had performance issues with my limited notes (just testing things, didn't want to go all the way in), and various copy/paste drag and drop UX issues that made the experience frustrating.
- I started using Zettlr after Obsidian and i am pretty happy with it (besides one or two little things). I'll also look into Notesnook
- Nice ive been using obsidian as well I'll give this a shot
- Currently im using standard note but id love to give this a try. I first heard of it from techlore
- Can you self host this yet?
  
  in alpha: https://github.com/streetwriters/notesnook-sync-server
  
  Nice, I checked earlier on mobile but couldn't find it. Not sure why. Thank you!

322 comments