I'm really new to Obsidian, installed it a week ago and right now I'm working on learning the basics. Since I'm a university student, I want to have a collection of all my notes and ideas to 1) get a better understanding of central concepts in my chosen degree and 2) find new questions and topics for papers and eventually my dissertation.

I'd been using OneNote for years and know all the shortcuts, but OneNote makes it difficult to connect thoughts and topics, which imo is essential for finding gaps in the current research. You can link pages and paragraphs which I've been doing so far but I have to manually link both pages, which is annoying.

Additionally, I don't like how OneNote handles PDF. The printout function is great until you want to move the images or share them. And pictures really slow down OneNote. There used to be an option to resize all selected pictures but now I'd have to use an add-on.

Now I just use Edge to make handwritten annotations and put a file link in OneNote. Since handwritten annotations are the only thing that's been making me stick with OneNote, I decided to try another app.

In the end, I just want an efficient way to take notes and find them again quickly.

Effective note-taking for me means not having to worry about formatting (too much) while writing—I want to just get into the flow and write everything down that's interesting to me. Plus, quickly link when something makes me think of another topic/concept/note etc.

tl;dr: replace OneNote