In 2026, I want to change my OS. I'm hesitating between

• Arch  
• Devuan
• Gentoo  
• Guix and
• Void
  

Things to consider:

• I've already installed and used Arch some years ago; I'm considering Artix, excluding the s6 init (I'm not prepared for this one);
• gentoo and Guix are probably the most complex distros1
• Void is certainly the most comfortable choice.
• It's to install in real hardware: Intel i5-7400 3ghz, ssd 1to, 32gb ram, nvidia geforce 1060 3gb. Yes, I want to play light videogames sometimes  Main purpose would be to learn Linux, Web, writing MarkDown and Org, zettlekasten organisation, etc...
  #linux #archlinux #ArtixLinux #devuan #gentoo #GuixSystem #voidlinux #emacs #doomemacs #vim #orgmode #orgroam #vim #HelixEditor #zettlekasten

1: complex ≠ complicated

My philosophy with newbies learning how to use #Obsidian and organize their #PKM is just start simple and come up with your own system bit by bit and tweak along the way. (I don't like following other people's systems.)

Yesterday I wondered if there was a better way 🤣. Thanks to the core plugin Bases and the community plug-in Notebook Navigator, I managed to organize my tag sprawl into something more manageable. Tags are such a pain - I have no idea how to use them before, so I simply tagged stuff randomly in the past. So, Notebook navigator revealed that I had hundreds of tags, with many of them only used once 🫠
So, yesterday I spent a long time getting rid of them.

Fortunately, organizing my vault is one of those activities I love, so I had a lot of fun doing it but it was still tedious nitpicky work.

My next step is to come up with a way to catalog and org my PKM. I've used Obsidian mostly as a word processor cum research base to write drafts for posts and journals, but each of these drafts can be knowledge docs. I may have to finally apply the #Zettlekasten system 😆

Although most of my work-time has been spent on #Zettlekasten¹ and related work, I am still doing research on the Republic of Letters with an aim of reimplementing it.²

I discover other people also inspired by the Rep. Letters: "This project […] proposes to reënact this concept for the purposes of exchange of visions of the future of Europe.”³ They're more about broadcast than point-to-point, it seems.

¹ https://blog.oddly-influenced.dev/2025/10/30/hypertext-zettelkasten.html
² https://blog.oddly-influenced.dev/2025/09/06/a-proposal-to-resurrect-the.html
³ https://www.republic-of-letters.eu/about/

So far... I am liking #SiYuan #Zettlekasten system. Unlike #obsidian its build for network hosting use.

Istallation was a breeze.

My major gripe, and I guess it goes to all systems like this is document conversion. But then I guess, they are NOT a document management system.

Searching for org-mode ideas, I've spent ~19 minutes watching this video about how searching for the next great note-taking system/app is procrastinating (time wasted). I feel I wasted ~19 minutes watching this video.

Here it is in case you want to waste that time yourself.

https://youtu.be/baKCC2uTbRc

#orgmode #productivity #zettlekasten

@ike There are other tools, (a lot of my work has been for parsing expression grammars for instance).

The approach has been to provide a flexible notation which behaves like a shorthand (think Pitman or the utility underlying Shavian alphabet).
The annotation range is about 1 trillion, which can boil down to either a simple regex (roughly `[rdxtfcygvuhbijnokm][qwe2][rdxtfcygvuhbijnokm]?`).

As such, rather than a #zettlekasten need to imperitively link one can categorise in a declarative manner

Small question to the fellow mastodon members:
Do you use #anki ? If so, what do you use it for ?

I’m trying to use anki alongside obsidian (#zettlekasten) and I’m not at school anymore. I would want some ides on how people use it in their day to day lives