[I started to write this in response to Craft comments in the recent Walling thread, but then decided it might need a thread of its own.]

I am getting close to retiring, so two things are occurring:

1. I won't need apps that work on Mac AND Windows; and
2. I am looking to cutback on the apps I pay for and what I pay for them.

This likely means I will stop using my favorite app, Reflect, because it costs $120 a year and is basically just a daily notes app (a great one).

Craft is an appealing and intriguing app. I have been trying to work it into my info-manager workflow for some time, but it never quite seems to click. The team behind it sure does work hard at adding features and -- more importantly -- functionality. It can replace three apps if I were to adopt it. And its subscription is half that of Reflect.

Of course, I can always just use Apple's lineup of apps that come free on the Mac and iPad. But the CRIMPER in me resists that "easy" out.

Increasingly, I'm looking for apps that work across all platforms, not just Mac and Windows (reading a lot of Cory Doctorow at the moment, and boy, the manipulations of Big Tech are just so depressing!)

So I'm experimenting on ZorinOS (a very nice Linux distro that comes as close to Mac/Windows as you could possibly expect, and is remarkably difficult to bork – unlike e.g. Linux Mint which, despite its stellar reputation, is very easy to f*ck up as a relative novice in Linux customisation).

Apps I currently use across all platforms (Mac, Windows, Android, iOS, Linux):
- TickTick
- Obsidian
- UpNote
- Simplenote
- Aerion
- Beeper (with more or less success, but it's relatively new)
- reMarkable Desktop
- DocFetcher Pro (desktop only)
- Vivaldi (with sync option activated)
- HelixNotes
- NotesHub
- Treesheets (desktop only)
- SiYuan
- SoftMaker Office
- Notesnook
- LibreOffice (desktop only)
- PDFsam Basic (desktop only)
- Super Productivity
- Typora (desktop only)
- Zettlr (desktop only)
- Tangent (desktop only)

I also experiment with a few others:
- AppFlowy
- Anytype
- RocketCake (desktop only)
- Octarine (desktop only)
- Collabora Office

Zorin includes a very nice little utility that allows your Android smartphone to "talk" directly to the desktop OS, Zorin Connect.

I use Nextcloud as my main syncing platform for all these platforms, although on Android I have to use ActiveSync instead, because the Nextcloud mobile client is truly awful.

Linux distros have an ongoing issue with Sleep/Suspend mode; sometimes it works, sometimes it takes ages for a computer to wake up. Personally, I've solved this by powering off my laptop every time I've finished working on it. So fast does ZorinOS boot (on an ancient MacBook Air) that it's actually much quicker to reboot than wake it up from Sleep. Amusing...

That's a lot of apps. Many of them are free, or run over a Nextcloud subscription (or equivalent). SoftMaker Office is a hidden gem in the office stakes – a German office suite that mimics MS Office very well and is much prettier than LibreOffice. Having said that, LibreOffice is highly compatible with MS Office, and sometimes I find it can open/edit files with which SoftMaker Office is having difficulties. My favourite rapid data transfer app is Simplenote (although I have a few others like the Clipboard/Screenshot/Upload Remote series that are also useful); Simplenote is very reliable, very quick and very painless. Zorin Connect does copy clipboards between a ZorinOS-powered PC and a smartphone, however.

I've tried to love Craft but... no. It's a bit too fragmented for my liking, although it's a beautiful app and the team behind it work like Trojans to improve it. If you want that kind of complexity, opt for Obsidian (and maybe Obsidian Sync).

For e-mail I rely on Canary on Mac, Windows and mobile, and I'm experimenting with various other clients on Linux (Canary doesn't do one). Aerion is nice and multi-platform, but Vivaldi has a built-in e-mail client that also works very well. Vivaldi is a bit of a revelation, in fact – very nice browser that does an awful lot of stuff (and is compatible with Chrome extensions, meaning I can copy web pages into e.g. UpNote, Obsidian, Quiver, MojoPad, etc.)

I've never been dependent on Google Mail – I run our own mail services off Germany-based IONOS, which is a very well-established and reliable platform for most things. Others swear by the Swiss platform Proton, which is very privacy-focused. I've also been experimenting with Murena Workspace, offered by the people who sell various smartphones with e/OS/ (Google-free Android); it's a tailored version of Nextcloud and works very well. Murena is based in Holland, their servers are in Finland.

I hope that might be of interest/use to those of you who, like me, too, are near retirement and want to move away from the Broligarchy (to quote Carole Cadwalladr).

Best wishes to all!
Bill

While I do not dispute this in one sense, in another I do. I recognize the amazing flexibility of Obsidian, but much of that relies on third-party plug-ins, which I don't entirely trust. Craft has an amazing amount of versatility out of the box. To some extent this is apples and oranges. There are things you can do with Obsidian that you can't with Craft, but I don't need those functionalities. So for me, personally, Craft would be the better choice.

Bill wrote:

I've tried to love Craft but... no. It's a bit too fragmented for my liking, although it's a beautiful app and the team behind it work like Trojans to improve it. If you want that kind of complexity, opt for Obsidian (and maybe Obsidian Sync).

I too am nearing retirement, and recently I've been looking at Remnote as a possible replacement for Tana now that Tana has gone all-in on collaboration and AI. Remnote has potential as a PKM, even though I have no need at all for the student-focused flashcards other learning methods. It also seems to have had staying power. For me it may fall into that group of apps that I'm more likely to spend time customizing than actually using, and it also falls into the $95-$150/yr range that seems to be where most programs like this land. (I have a certain kind of respect for Evernote, which went the other direction and now costs north of $200/yr according to the message I got when I last opened my free version).

I use Craft for things like trip planning and other projects where I'm collecting information from various sources, and I find it great for that. I don't find it useful for actually working with information at any kind of scale. I've gotten used to using properties/fields/attributes, etc., for finding information based on more nuanced categories, and I don't have the sense that Craft can easily do that the way Tinderbox/Tana/Remnote and others can. Craft was surprisingly slow to adopt tags, and it's still quite rough around the edges in that area (e.g., users have called it out for not implementing global management of tags yet -- to edit a tag name, you have to do it individually in every item with that tag).