I understand why the world is the way it is, but still it should have been obvious all along that it is not ideal for the government to data in a file format owned by a company. Even worse, a foreign company.
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Great news!
Mostโcertainly not all, but mostโdocuments that are written in Microsoft Word, or in LibreOffice Writer, would be better off as either markdown plain text files, or as LaTeX.
CMV.
Nice! A huge blow to those still trying to push Microsoft
When are we going to have the equivalent for PDF documents, with the ability to comment, fill and sign, as in AdobeAR?
This is something very important: Don't focus on aplications (FOSS or not) but on open data formats and proper import/export mechanisms so you can switch applications easily.
That's why I use Obsidian! It's not open source, but all my notes are just... pre-emptively saved as markdown files on disk. If they fuck me over I can just leave and open it in literally any markdown editor ๐ญ
If they used a proprietary format, I probably just wouldn't have used them in the first place and would have had to use a shittier alternative.
Same! Them using markdown means I've been able to make an Obsidian-like app for Wear OS, with a phone app to sync your vault to the watch. Wouldn't have been possible if they weren't using markdown. Hoping to launch it on the Google Play store in a month or so :)
I love obsidian, I wanted to send a donation, but they only sell merch with expensive shipping :<
Which markdown format?
GitHub or Stack Exchange or Reddit?
Obsidian is pretty good. I currently use Logseq, which has a slightly different model that clicked a bit better for me. As a bonus, it's open-source.
You could, I don't know, use an open source note taking app? I mean, it's not like obsidian has some unique and unmatched capabilities ยฏโ \โ _โ (โ ใโ )โ _โ /โ ยฏ
What is a plaintext (non-database) md editor that had wikilinks, LaTeX, back links, tags, PDF export, properties and dataviews, and a plugin community? Plus it needs an android app and desktop app that can be synced (even just via syncthing) seamlessly.
I am always open for switching!
If you drop the plaintext requirement (which IMO is anachronistic, if not for the necessity to fend against a potentially turning hostile developer in a close-source set-up), you may find https://triliumnotes.org/ liberating.
If you must stick to the "notes as plain text files" paradigm, siyuan is better than obsidian in about every aspect, and logseq in other, more niche ones. Trilium is better than them all (IMHO), being the only one that does "note as data" correctly and efficiently (you don't have the same data model divide like seen in notion between notes and databases).
Vscodium for notes, interesting.
I looked into joplin before obsidian actually, but it is much more of a standard note taker, not good for zettelkasten sort of notes (link and tag focused)
Im.very into "AsCode" and pretty comfortable with vi bindings. So the two extremes where i document (random notes with no structure needed and formally verified documentation ) it works for me.
I can preview the markdown, use vale rules to enforce style and vocab, do mermaid.js diagrams, link my UML to stuff, etc.
Then check into git to do version control or just to save it off local.
Joplin is reasonably good as long as you don't use so much metadata to keep things organised. It's also pretty rigid, and hence limiting. If you want something with the superficial simplicity of joplin, but that would scale up to your needs, I recommend giving https://triliumnotes.org/ a good look.
The silence is deafening, because there isnโt a FOSS program that comes close to Obsidianโs functionality. This isnโt the first time Iโve seen someone drop the โlul just use FOSS insteadโ line to garner upvotes, when literally no FOSS alternative exists. There are some FOSS programs that come close in some regards, but none of them do everything Obsidian does and support multiple platforms.
Lemmy has an obsession with FOSS (for good reason) but that means many users basically try to act like FOSS vegans. Theyโd use six different (and largely incompatible) FOSS programs just to scratch the surface of what a closed-source program can do. And their hackles start to raise if you ever point out that there arenโt FOSS alternatives for everything.
The silence of two hours ago lol
Chill brother. Like i get it, and FOSS advocates should lead with meaningful alternitives first imho, but there definitly seems to be some https://joplinapp.org/
I personally prefer vscodium and nvim myself for notes but that isnt a one for one comparison to obsidian (in either direction) imho
ok, but there's not much substance to your comment besides unsubstantiated "zealotry" towards obsidian and some general hot takes against lemmy and the FOSS community through which it emerged.
Maybe you could start listing out a few aspects and features of obsidian that you deem so important and unique, and I'm sure that you may discover a few very compelling alternatives.
As far as I'm concerned, I'm all set with https://triliumnotes.org/ . It's not just a more versatile and capable note taking app, it's also one that I can deploy simultaneously "local first" and "as a web service", so my notes are reachable everywhere (even where I'm not allowed to install the heavy client).
I'm an Obsidian user myself, but I have heard good things about Logseq
Do you have any recommendations?
Since it's a topic that comes back often on /c/selfhosted@lemmy.world I didn't want to open new floodgates, but I can only warmly recommend https://triliumnotes.org/ :-)
This is not a recommendation or a preference, it is a mandate,
ODFโs mandate is the document-layer expression of that principle, as you cannot claim digital sovereignty while allowing your documents to be locked in proprietary formats controlled by a single vendor.
incredibly based
Meanwhile OnlyOffice is saving to Macroslop format by default: https://piefed.social/c/libreoffice/p/1803568/libreoffice-blasts-fake-open-source-onlyoffice-for-working-with-microsoft-to-lock-users
At least something good amid all the bad news regarding the future of software systems
I think this is not (entirely) true. Or at least I have some questions:
- Is this an enacted law that I missed? Because it looks like it is a work in progress.
- "All levels of government" Really? We have federalism. I am not sure, if that can be mandated by the governments.
BTW: https://deutschland-stack.gov.de/
I have searched a bit further: For federal and state governments, ODF is binding through IT Planning Council resolutions and federal guidelines, but there is no formal law yet mandating its use. Also, this is not binding for local authorities, but virtual it is.
It's a typo, they wanted to make support of the IDF mandatory
Bravo. Can't believe it has taken this long for a gov't to realize storing everything in a poorly obfuscated format makes no sense.
good!
Germanyโs decision to anchor ODF at the heart of its national sovereign stack confirms what we have argued for years: open, vendor-neutral document formats are not a niche concern for some technology specialists and FOSS advocates. They are a fundamental infrastructure for democratic, interoperable and sovereign public administrations.
I'm gonna repeat this, as expressed here, to a few people
As a guy who worked with property recods in US fucking yes. Some states gove the records in a closed format invented by one company. So you have to have their software if you want to work in some states.
Add it to the pile of illegal shit that is legal I guess...
Hopefully the rest of Europe will follow.
Oddly the UK is somehow ahead here https://www.gov.uk/guidance/using-open-document-formats-odf-in-your-organisation
Despite being so shit in many different respects (a chronic use of external consultants and contractors means the UK seems less likely than other European countries to make progress on a sovereign tech stack), the UK is pretty good with its data. There's a surprisingly amount of data that's released and is in a sensible format.
During the teachers strikes last year, I ended up using playing around making visualisations using the data about the number of teachers in various parts of the country, and I was pleased to see how much there was there and how clearly it was documented. There are very few things I'm proud of the UK for, so I am glad to have this as one
The UK seemingly got some cool nerds in the government: the gov.uk sites were regarded as the golden standard of design and accessibility in the 2010s, idk about currently. Commercial designers straight up studied gov.uk's design guidelines to see how a job like that should be done.
Yeah, I knew that, it's super cool, and it came to mind as I was writing my earlier comment.
What's neat about the website stuff is that even if it's not as good now (idk, I haven't looked), that value they created is still there in the older case study โ there were so many good resources. I was the disability rep in a few student societies, as well as in a few volunteer orgs after uni, and we referenced the guidelines a few times. Good resources like that are especially useful in those contexts โ because they helped turn "that would be nice, but we don't have the resources to implement accessibility in our materials" into "okay, let's put our money where our mouth is and do our best to make something as accessible as we can"
Wow, some good news on Lemmy? Sign me up!
Sick! Are there any more of these?
!positivity@lemmy.today (shameless self-promotion)
Hell yes. I wonder how many man-hours of strategy meetings MS had on their calendars to fend that decision off.
It's so good to see initiatives like these! Hope it spreads across Europe and the World.
Isn't odf the one used by libre office?
More than that, it's standardization made MS panic and pseudo-standardize their OOXML (.docx & co.) a year later, since some govt wanted to switch to ODF back in 2007, instead of relying on some proprietary format. The pseudo, because most of the format is proprietary extensions (and only the strict variant is standard-conformant, which MS doesn't set as default), which made the standardization a ...unusual process.
Btw, usually, there's only one standard format for a specific usecase.
Edit: typo
Yes and they switched form MsOffice to Libre like few years ago for all government agencies
Isn't it odt that LibreOffice uses? I wonder what the difference is.
Gotta love Germany.
Fun fact: the German equivalent of the BBC, DW, will teach you German if you want to learn it, for free. A but niche but a nice thing to do!
DW isn't the equivalent of the BBC. It's more of a equivalent to e.g. Radio Free Europe. DW is entirely funded by the German government, in contrast to the BBC or ARD/ZDF which are independently funded. I'm not saying DW is bad, but it isn't the equivalent of the BBC.
Their contract with Microslop must be up for renegotiation.
The framework adopts a โMade in EU firstโ principle, requires open interfaces and local data storage, mandate open source development where proprietary ownership would otherwise apply, and explicitly aims to reduce vendor lock-in effects.
This is such a wet dream ๐ฅน

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