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2mo ago

Microsoft is killing OneNote for Windows 10

www.neowin.net Microsoft is killing OneNote for Windows 10

Windows 10's end of support is imminent, and the operating system's upcoming demise is also taking down OneNote for Windows 10.

Technology @europe.pub

www.neowin.net /news/microsoft-is-killing-onenote-for-windows-10/

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Windows @sopuli.xyz

Microsoft is killing OneNote for Windows 10

www.neowin.net /news/microsoft-is-killing-onenote-for-windows-10/

16 0

147 comments

This is not to be confused with the application called "OneNote", that's staying.
You can always trust Microsoft to make two version of the same application and to have really bad naming.
- TwoNotes
  
  Two apps, OneNote.
- You can always trust Microsoft to make two version of the same application and to have really bad naming.
  And to make bad naming worse naming, since they switched Office's name to 365 Copilot, not to be confused with 365 (office premium), Copilot (ChatGPT interface), or Copilot (Office text assistant). Office was a perfectly serviceable name they'd used for decades. It's like Twitter rebranding themselves to a single latter like Y. Why would they throw away branding like that?
  People are liable to look for office, not find it, and go "oh, Microsoft doesn't sell Word any more ☹️'
  
  Their enterprise products as well. Azure is now Entra, all the admin page rebrandings like defender, purview, intune, the URL changes, etc.
  Please just stick with a name already!!
- Hell, just talking about teams in Teams is confusing enough.
  
  Are you talking about Teams in Teams for Home or Teams for Work and School, and is it Teams or New Teams you mean?
- The OneNote Microsoft wanted to discontinue in favor of the Win10 OneNote a few years ago is staying, so they can axe the Win10 OneNote.
  From 2018: https://rcpmag.com/articles/2018/04/19/onenote-desktop-app-sunset.aspx
- Which is sometimes called Onenote 2016, bundled with Office. I think. Pretty sure there's a third version too.
- I got so sick of their shit. I think there were two Teams and Skype versions too. Wtf is their problem?? I just stick with LibreOffice for everything now, but eyeing OnlyOffice because of their cloud service.
  
  Yes, there was Teams (classic) and Teams (new. There's also Outlook (new) and Outlook (classic).
  There was the Snipping Tool and Snip & Sketch, it even said they were getting rid of Shipping Tool, but then they got rid of Snip & Sketch instead but the function of Snipping Tools is the same as Snip & Sketch.
  
  ~~OpenOffice is unmaintained, unfortunately (see the LibreOffice page explaining this); LibreOffice considers officially hosting a cloud service out of their scope but~~ Collabora does provide hosting (and you can self-host, of course). Their "Development Edition" is the free version that doesn't come with an SLA.
  edit: I can't read
- And it's a web/Electron app anyways. At least the O365-connected version is.
- How do I know which one I'm using? Are you talking about the windows store one (tablet one) being the one that's discontinued while the one that's bundled with o365 (desktop version) being continued?
  
  That's correct.

This is a good time to switch to Notesnook, which has a OneNote importer.
Why am I about to shill so hard for this particular app? Simple, because after Evernote enshittified over a decade ago, I switched to OneNote as the least terrible alternative, and then spent the next ten years trying to find an actually good, open source notes app.
Call me Ahab because this motherfucker has been my white whale for a not-insignificant portion of my life.
Notesnook, finally, hit everything I wanted;
You can self host it (but you don't have to)
Self hosters get everything on the paid plan for free
It has a web app, a desktop app, and a healthy ecosystem of phone apps, with - very importantly - 1:1 feature parity. Everything you want to do you can do from any of the interfaces and for the most part they're even laid out identically.
It has a proper rich text WYSIWYG editor. It does not demand you learn FUCKING MARKDOWN. JESUS H CHRIST I DO NOT WANT TO LEARN A FUCKING SYNTAX TO MAKE NOTES, WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?
But for those who care about that stuff, it is built on markdown, and all your notes can be exported in markdown, so there's no lock in. And you can use markdown in the editor (without even having to switch modes like a lot of other editors).
Everything is encrypted by default. Notes can also be individually password protected.
You can share copies of notes with optional password protection and self-destruction.
It has a really slick UI. Everything works, everything is intuitive, there are tonnes of keyboard shortcuts. I find I actually have an easier time writing long form text content (such as a novella I'm working on) in Notesnook than I did in Word or LibreOffice.
It builds a TOC for notes automatically. You can link notes to each other, and links are bidirectional so you can track which notes link to a particular note.
You have sorting by both tags, and notebooks. Notebooks are infinitely nestable, and - this is really cool - notes can exist in multiple notebooks simultaneously.
It has robust web clipper for Firefox and Chrome.
Very robust attachment support.
God so much more, I'm having to deliberately stop here.
What it's currently lacking is drawing support. If that's a must have for you, check out Joplin instead (at least for now, I've seen some talk about Notesnook integrating Excalibur for digital canvas, which would be a superb solution).
Anyway, please check out Notesnook. It's excellent, and I like sharing excellent things. https://notesnook.com/downloads/
- It has a proper rich text WYSIWYG editor. It does not demand you learn FUCKING MARKDOWN. JESUS H CHRIST I DO NOT WANT TO LEARN A FUCKING SYNTAX TO MAKE NOTES, WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?
  I’m curious about this agressive stance. Why is markdown so triggering for you ? I get the pros of WYSIWYG but it has also some cons. On Lemmy for instance you use markdown without even noticing ?
  I use Obsidian and I’m happy with it. The markdown syntax is really easy and it’s « almost » WYSIWYG because you see the markdown only at your cursor. It even has a plugin for excalidraw.
  
  Yeah after spending my adulthood on reddit and lemmy markdown is second nature and I don't like it not being maintained in notesnook thr way it is in Obsidian. I'd prefer a foss solution though and notesnook looks like otherwise it's better
- Ok you win, I'll try it.
- I am trying it out given all the praise.
  I can't create more than 5 (!) tags in the free version
  it can't export notes in anything else than borked text files in the free version (formatting lost, no markdown, no pdf, no html)
  it doesn't let me choose where I store my notebooks, in fact does not tell me where it saves them at all
  backup files are not human-readable, they don't appear to be zip files in disguise, they are seemingly locked to notesnook (".nnbackupz")
  the importer/converter is on the web, and requires me to upload all my plain text MD files for conversion
  I use QOwnNotes on the daily, which does not have any such limitations. On the other hand, it's a markdown editor, which means your monitor space is divided by two : it has separate editing & preview panes. It's honestly a bummer because apart from that it's pretty much perfect
- What a fucking shill. I’m downloading this right now.
- Did you by chance self host the sync server using docker compose? Their instructions aren't great and I was hoping you had some tips.
  For anyone else interested, if I figure it out, I'll post what I did here.
  Edit 1: I finally got it all setup but syncing isn't working so I guess I did something wrong 🙄 . Troubleshooting now
  
  So yes, I did, and yes, their docs suck (better documentation is on their roadmap).
  There's a really good guide here on Lemmy that I recommend instead. https://lemmy.ml/post/25006407
  Following this I had it up and running in no time. Check the comments as well, I added some notes on getting attachments working. If you're still having issues shoot me a message and I'll try to help.
  
  : I finally got it all setup but syncing isn't working so I guess I did something wrong
  $5 says you need a srv record or something that wasn't obvious from the docs
- 1 star reviews on the app store consistently mention sync issues and bugs that delete notes and don't allow opening. Have you encountered any of this?
  
  Not even once. The syncing has been incredibly robust for me. It also has a really nice flow for handling conflicts.
  Of course, it's worth keeping in mind that it can new self-hosted, so experiences will vary.
  I'm using the self hosted version. Take from that what you will.
  
  It looks like that's a minority of users. Currently 4.6/5 on the Play Store, with 100,000 downloads. Embarrassingly, I still use Evernote but I need to ditch it. I'm going to try it out!
- I'll give it a look. I've been using Joplin since Evernote enshittified, and I didn't know it had drawing support. I very rarely use Markdown, though. You can hide that with two interface tweaks, which I did years ago on my machines. (I have to look it up again every time I add a new machine, so it's not perfect.)
  Is Notesnook FOSS? I expect any closed-source software to enshittify over time. 🙁
  
  Yes, it's all open source and can be self-hosted. They run a paid plan, but if you self host then you get all the paid features free.
- +1 for notesnook. It's probably my go to example of how good open source projects can be.
- real MVP right here.
- Any ink support?
  
  For drawing I suggest Rnote
- Not to judge a book by its cover (ironically), but that name…
  
  Which name, "VoroxPete"? Is that a shill or a liar in something?
- Worth mentioning that the bidirectional linking works for notes themselves, or even certain parts in notes. So if Note A has a list and I want to link to a certain list item from that inside Note B, I can do that. Super cool functionality imo
- I will try it! Never heard of it. I also hate the markdown nonsense.
- Lots of limitations for markdown: No underlining No colors Limited table formatting
  
  Not like markdown can underline without using html markup...
- Obsidian also has an importer, and some good sync plugins.
  
  It's also not open source. Totally people's choice if they still want to use it, but that's important to many. If so, I do predict you'll eventually experience the inevitable enshittification...
- too bad it doesnt support handwriting i was looking for something to unify my handwritten and markdown note-taking
  
  If you can, take a moment to upvote Drawing Support in their suggested features section; https://notesnook.com/roadmap/
- What notepad requires markdown?
- I cannot agree with you any harder about FUCKING MARKDOWN. Fuck me I hate that every fucking note app wants me to write in fucking markdown. FUCK. THAT. SHIT.
- You badass you

Microsoft is working hard to get you to transition to a Linus Distribution. Thank you microsoft for your hard work and dedication.
- People will never switch. I see at my work how colleagues just learn how to accept the endless shit without even reacting to it anymore.
  
  Like US politics... 🤮
  
  Every time Netflix raises prices their subscriber numbers jump. There are people out there who pay for Netflix with ads.
  
  I have some niche software for my racecar I can't seem to get to run on Linux and it's the only reason I'm still on Windows. Although now that I've finally got a new desktop, I can dual boot again.
  Oh and I run a few games via the Xbox app so that kinda keeps me on there as well.

It's the usual rename and replace that Microsoft love to do.
"OneNote for Windows 10" is going to be replaced by "OneNote for Windows"
Why they always do the kill, rename and replace instead of just replace with an update? Each kill&replace operation leads to lost users...
- Because they are too big to make intelligent decisions.

While OneNote for Windows 10 still has roughly half a year, Microsoft will start nagging users with update prompts much earlier. For starters, in June 2025, Microsoft will slow down the app's sync performance, thus forcing customers to ditch the old app, especially those using OneNote on multiple devices or for real-time collaboration.
Next, in July 2025, banners will make their way to OneNote for Windows 10 to make sure users are aware of the upcoming end of support. Microsoft says these banners "could impact users workflows." You do not say, Microsoft.
Wait. You're gonna throttle them and then wait a month to tell them why you're throttling them? What?
- Thats so shitty

Looks like I made a good decision deciding to move from onenote to obsidian last month. I like that it is a fancy mark down editor so I can just move my text files some where else if I decide to not use Obsidian in the future. When it comes to onenote functionality of being able to draw or paste where ever I want the excalidraw plugin which is open source has met my needs.
Been nice to move to something that is multi platform.
- Obsidian is a fancy markdown editor with metadata, sync, indexing, data querying and views and a lively ecosystem of plugins. It has everything except being open source.
  
  It would be incredible to have a self hosted web UI but that's a tall ask. Instead I've been using Quartz to generate a static site from hot reloading which seems to cover this end to a degree.
  
  I use QOwnNotes. It is open source and works with nextcloud/owncloud, files are stored in plain text so if you wanted to switch to something else it should be pretty simple.

Neowin is the web site where their writers can stupidly claim that Qt getting an advertisement module means that KDE will have ads in their apps soon.
https://web.archive.org/web/20220119103026/https://www.neowin.net/news/ads-may-be-coming-to-kde-the-popular-linux-desktop/
Stop linking to them.
- Do you have more info about the source? I currently know nothing about neowin or qt, and only a little about KDE. Are other Linux news sources debunking that article?
  
  Phoronix, It's FOSS, Linux Journal, NixCraft, and OMG! Ubuntu are my sources.
  
  There is none of them, because there is absolutely nothing connecting the former to latter. Since Neowin stated it themselves, the burden of proof lies entirely on them and they literally cannot provide any.
  To quote the "article":
  While it’s doubtful you’ll see ads in KDE’s core applications, it would be possible for distributions that wish to further monetize their work to fork these applications, placing ads in them.

Feature	Notion	Joplin	Obsidian	Evernote	Zoho Notebook	GoodNotes	Zim Wiki	Standard Notes	MyInfo	YouTrack	Logseq
Cloud Sync	Yes	Yes	Optional (via plugins or sync service)	Yes	Yes	Yes	Manual	Yes	Manual	Yes / Self-hosted	Optional (self-sync)
Offline Support	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes (Web cache)	Yes
Handwriting Support	No	Limited	No	Yes	Yes	Excellent	No	No	No	No	No
Encryption	No	Yes (E2EE)	No (unless encrypted drive)	Partial	No	No	No	Yes (E2EE)	No	Depends on hosting	Partial (local)
Hierarchy Support	Yes	Yes	Yes (Folders + Backlinks)	Yes	Partial	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	Yes (Wiki, Issues, Projects)	Yes (Outline + Backlinks)
Free Version	Yes	Yes	Yes	Limited	Yes	Limited	Yes	Limited	No	Yes (up to 10 users)	Yes
Platform Support	Win, macOS, iOS, Android, Web	Win, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android	Win, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android	Win, macOS, iOS, Android, Web	Win, macOS, iOS, Android, Web	iOS, iPadOS, macOS	Win, Linux	Win, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android, Web	Windows	Web, Win, macOS, Linux	Win, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android

E: I noticed a couple mistakes. Lemme know if you spot others and I can edit (at time of this writing anyways)

This is unreadable on mobile in portrait mode
- Perfectly readable with the Voyager App.
- On Boost, the columns got narrowed to each three characters wide, just to fit all columns on screen width-wise
I suggest You track, which has a Wiki component. It had extensions like Draw.IO as well for diagramming which is basically a necessity for me.
Its self hostable or a free cloud version.
- Great note - thanks for the contribution.
I personally use Obsidian, but I know that other have suggested logseq. Might be useful to have in your table. Also, Obsidian does have an Android app.
- Thanks - good notes
Excluding Google Keep?
- Google
  The only list any of their services should be included in is the list of things to avoid.

Obsidian ftw

I'm very interested in OneNote alternatives. I've been using OneNote for longer than I've disliked Microsoft... and I still think it's a good app. Pretty much the only thing I don't like about OneNote is the increasingly close integration with Windows accounts. I'd rather my notes were not scanned and uploaded and processed by a US mega-corp...
Anyway, people keep suggesting stuff like Joplin. But that isn't even vaguely close to OneNote in terms of stylus and inking. For me, inking is the main core feature. And so in terms of alternatives, xournal++ is a closer fit. (xournal++ has essentially no organisational structure for notes; but it is really great for inking.)
What I'd really like is basically the organisational structure of Joplin (or whatever other alternative) + the inking power of xournal++. And ideally being able to import my vast amounts of handwritten OneNote work! -- But that last bit is probably too much to ask.
- I've been using Any.type for a bit over a year, and am very happy with it, but I don't believe it has hand writing support.
  There is a free tier that includes 1gb synced storage (optional).
  It's open source. Somewhat similar to Obsidian, but no plugin support that I'm aware of.
- I switched from OneNote a couple of years ago.
  For hand writing i suggest using Rnote and for normal keyboard writing I suggest Joplin. Keep it synced using cloud provider or using Syncthing for free.
  About organizational structure in Rnote I unfortunatelly recommend just saving files in a structure of folders. Rnote is the most polished alternative to hand-writing capabilities of OneNote I've found :c
  About importing notes. I don't think that's possible but you can surely export them all to PDF from OneNote. I did that when I migrated.
  
  Thanks for the suggestion. I'll check out Rnote sometime soon.
  (As I said, I do like the writing & drawing features of xournal++; and so I've been doing a bit of basic file / folder organising with that already; but it certainly isn't as easily browseable as OneNote.)

Until they make a proper upgrade to my surface 10, I will have no other choice but to stay on the windows 10 version.
- clears throat
  Surface Linux Kernel. Surface 10 supported.
  Some distros of Linux that have SLK rolled in:
  Nobara:
  Based on fedora
  Made by GloriousEggroll who also is responsible for protonGE a great derivative of the Steam Proton compatibility layer for playing windows games on Linux
  Development and maintaining it is done by a single dude, so if something happens to him, that's the project done, this is not in the Pros section.
  BlissOS:
  for when you really just want your surface device to be running Android
  immutable distro, makes it easier to undo fuck ups, and often prevents them happening at all
  seems fairly mature and robust, I don't know for a fact as I haven't used it
  Gentoo Surface:
  for when you want to put a bit more effort in
  the instructions here are from building Gentoo locally using and Arch LiveISO
  FOR WHEN YOU WANT TO PUT MORE EFFORT IN
  These were the really easy to find options. There's absolutely going to be more that have SLK rolled in...but that's not actually necessary, as the SLK git has easy to follow instructions on rolling it into whatever distro might interest you. The whole Linux universe is your oyster.
  I have a Surface Pro 4, and I run Nobara, works great, better than windows. There are some hardware things that don't 100% work on some surface devices. Here is the Supported device list and Features Matrix. Looks like the SP10 doesn't like to hibernate, and doesn't have working cameras atm.
  
  Doesn't really solve my OneNote problem, as I run it on no fewer than 7 macOS, windows, iOS, and android devices.
  
  Big thanks for this. Been thinking about what to do with my daughter's Surface Book once Win10 is EOL and it looks like Nobara will be the first and hopefully final stop.

I use it all the time

Well shit. Time to rip my own files because their migration stuff is going to be all Microsoft proprietary.

Joke is on them, I moved all my notes to Joplin 😎😂

Everyong recommending Obsidian in the comments, where are Logseq users?
- I stopped using it since they keep not updating the electron version they are using. It took them forever to update after electron 28 went EOL and they updated to a version that would go EOL about a week later, which they have been on ever since..
  Edit: They just bumped to a supported version, but only in master. It's still unknown when a release with a supported electron version is coming.

Can't you reinstall it? Or install an older version? Obligatory fuck Microsoft.

I really liked OneNote.
- Me too :( but it looks like it's time to jump ship and migrate all my content to a new app.

I like Joplin, it could work for me but about 6 months ago I had to quit. My use case is against my s3 instance (not amazon) with 3 devices syncing. It became corrupt everytime.
Has this improved?

This really pisses me off. I have so much shit in OneNote and use it regularly.

147 comments