LibreOffice ReleaseNotes 7.0

This looks great, and I plan to try it out. Looks like a FOSS competitor to Windows Journal but much better.

It does not (at least based on reading the readme and looking at the feature list) support pasting images, file attachments, or audio recordings, so I can' t directly migrate to it from OneNote but it certainly has handled the hard part (inking system on pages, saved to a local filesystem) and the PDF markup feature looks nifty.

CherryTree has some cool features. It's great to have a little tree on the side, too.

Apps like these (and other less-open example is NoteCase Pro) used to be my primary tool for information organization. I eventually moved to "files and folders containing whatever media I need" along with desktop-level keyboard shortcuts and buttons for navigating them and scripts for managing various aspects. This had the advantage of helping me work with the grain of my file system, so integrating various third-party apps or scripts into my workflow became dead simple.

The centralized software package approach was always unique and interesting (still is) but was also either too difficult to migrate (de facto lock-in, even when export filters were included) or otherwise fell out of development / support across a 20 year timespan.

Occasionally I make a new web page when the level of depth or applicability warrants it. HTML documents have been surprisingly resilient when used as notebooks. Even just a set of hyperlinks practically becomes its own specialized app when organized toward a specific purpose.

Another alt is Notable. It's just Markdown so it can't do the fancy stuff that OneNote does, but your files are just .mk files that you can sync with whatever device you want.

I'm still having a hard time switching from Evernote, though. It's just got too many years of me jotting things down that I can Ctrl-Q and find. My organization is an absolute mess though and it feels wrong to import all that garbage into one of these more modern apps.

I used Zim (https://zim-wiki.org/manual/Help/Notebooks.html) for a while and found it useful.

This looks very, very close! I may end up trying it as it seems I may be looking into a 'perfect is enemy of good' situation here.

This does not support handwriting / free-inking AFAICT but does have a very promising feature set:

* save to local sqlite

* desktop, terminal, mobile app

* E2EE

* Portable app for USBs

* WebDAV sync

* Dropbox, Evernote sync

* File attachments, and if they are images, the images are rendered

I have been contemplating ripping the onenote notebook out of OneDrive and onto the local file system, then using syncthing to sync it between my various devices.

While this solution will let me get back to business with OneNote 2010, I am still only buying myself time since long-term, I want to be using FOSS software or at least an open format file format like Sqlite.

lol. Yeah. I have spent a lot of time on other apps. I used to teach Photoshop and Illustrator at the local college. However the complexity of using those apps just felt like a lot. Moreso as I taught students how to make flyers and even simple websites, struggling with tools that would have been easier to use in MS Word. A huge part of the class was teaching the principles of design, which would have been easier had certain tools not been in the way so often. I did encourage my students to try out other software to see if they liked it better.

These days I really like the simplicity of LO Draw, for example. Any time I need a new map for a campaign, it's really easy to just add a new page to the main document. And there are zero licensing issues to track along with the many others I already track. Plus the principles of design work the same, so with this "one simple trick" (25+ years of illustration and design experience) I can get superior graphics quality results with the same tools that others think are not so great.

There's some nostalgia in there too; I used StarOffice from the moment I heard it was free. Back in the '90s that was kind of a big deal to a poor university student.

My dad used Lotus 1-2-3 almost every day since the DOS days and he's super fast drawing and doing stuff with the keyboard (not so much nowadays with Libre Office or MS Office) and he is used to do almost everything with a spreadsheet: floorplans, leaflets, diagrams...

Don't even try to get him to use a CAD or vector drawing software :D

This is, unfortunately, standard practice for the ASF. After Google shut down Wave in late 2010, they donated the code to the ASF; the project [1] sat largely inactive in the Apache Incubator until finally being shut down in 2018.

If you poke around in Apache's project list [2], you'll easily find other projects which followed a similar trajectory -- a few months, maybe a year of activity, followed by years of neglect.

[1]: http://incubator.apache.org/projects/wave.html

[2]: https://www.apache.org/index.html#projects-list

The OpenOffice people will probably still tell you the project is not dead. However, they have been almost incapable of making releases for the past few years. If you look at their code repo, there are an order of magnitude more commits going into LibreOffice (maybe multiple orders). I admire their tenacity but at some point the right thing to do was to hand over the Open Office name over to LibreOffice. The war has been over for years and LibreOffice won.

The title seems to suggest at first reading that 7.0 has been released already.