Obsidian

I started my note-taking journey with Notion, but it kept pulling me toward databases, layouts, and dashboards instead of actual notes. That is fun for a while, then I lose focus.

I switched to Obsidian because it mostly stays out of the way. What won me over is that it writes to plain Markdown files. They are easy to manipulate, reuse, and move somewhere else later. That also made it a good fit for starting a digital garden with Quartz.

The graph view is a nice extra. I do not use it all the time, but it is useful when I want a quick feel for how notes are connected.