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Obsidian

I’ve been using Obsidian as a means for visualizing my notes as well as a way to package up some of my notes for sharing and collaborating with others. It makes for a really nice way for mortals to view my markdown content. I’ve already added support for most of the same features Obsidian has in my own process, well before discovering Obsidian, but the thing that has me going back to Obsidian is that oh-so-nice ~murder wall~ Infinite Canvas.

I like dropping original source materials into a canvas and then starting to write markdown notes off to the sides where I’m contextualizing the new information. I’ve also used it to map out my capsule hierarchy from the perspective of user workflow. And I’ve made use of the excellent Excalidraw plugin to convert some hand drawn diagrams into SVGs. It’s really nice.

But it’s closed source. It has a plugin ecosystem that greatly enhances the functionality, and I have written some TypeScript experimentally, and that’s not bad, but Obsidian is ultimately closed source. It’s also not officially supported on any of my personal systems, all aarch64 linux systems. And it crashes after running for more than a few minutes on all of them.

And I can’t fix it. I extracted the AppImage, and I can see that it’s just a fancy Electron app (which I already suspected given that all of the open source components it leverages are JavaScript/Browser apps) but the actual place the crash happens isn’t in code I can see. And when it crashes it hangs indefinitely instead of dying nicely to produce a core file. So I can’t even patch the binary (no, seriously, I’ve done this before to patch leaks in systems that I no longer currently use, it sounds fancier than it is.)

I can’t even file a bug report because when it crashes it stops redrawing and so there’s nothing useful to capture.

It’s the first piece of closed source software that wasn’t a game that I have liked in a very long time.

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