Obsidian on Raspberry Pi 4
It works!
On a stormy night in January 2006 my classmate installed Debian as a second boot OS to my PC. Back then, Linux was not as widespread as today. Though percentage of users is about the same, in absolute numbers today it has a lot more users, and thus more apps available.
When I switched to ARM Linux using my Pi last fall, I felt some nostalgia about that first experience with Linux. First, initially I did use Debian on ARM which Raspberry Pi OS essentially is. Second, some apps I was used to were not available as desktop binaries. E.g. there is Viber for Linux x86, but no such for Linux ARM. So, I have low expectations about apps available, even if they run on Electron or similar engines.
Because of that, it was a pleasant surprise to know that a proprietary note taking app like Obsidian is actually available as a flatpak!
Though it has some killer note taking features, in my eyes the main reason to use it is because it is not inventing its own database format. You can pick a directory and just put Markdown files there, so Obsidian is basically a Markdown library browser. It does not consume much memory by modern standards and you can drop image files right into the text. They are copied into the root directory of library and shown as embedded images in view mode.
Here’s a file with embedded image in edit mode:
And here it is in a view mode:
Not sure why they decided not supporting embedded video, though. Maybe it is not “traditional” for md, or there are technical reasons.
If you don’t like proprietary apps
Kate
If you need to manage a library of Markdown text, without drag and drop images and having Markdown as just a text is fine for you, you can try using Kate and open its file library panel:
Other options
There is a variety of apps available for ARM Linux which provide similar functionality, from a very 2000-ish looking ones to the modern paradigm apps: