There was a discussion this morning about the pros/cons of using @obsdmd themes that make frequent breaking changes. I'm considered a power-user of Sanctum, which "moves fast and breaks things," and I wanted to take a moment & share why to me that's a feature, not a drawback.
Obsidian core is very stable.
But, personally, I expect to spend a couple of minutes every day working around something that doesn't quite work the way I expected it to. I beta test a lot of things for people. Bug-hunting is like a video game to me.
eleanorkonik.com/obsidian-replaced-games-now-prolific/
I don't have as many active plugins as someone like @brimwats but I do have 48 plugins installed, and I know full well and good they have bugs, because all software has bugs but complex hobby software provided for free by one developer is statistically more likely to have bugs.
Sometimes Fantasy Calendar's date doesn't iterate correctly, despite the dev's best efforts — and I'm definitely using Fantasy Calendar for things it wasn't intended for. The Pandoc plugin breaks if I have any spaces in my file path, which took me awhile to figure out.
The Primary theme is beautiful but doesn't have support yet for data-task attributes, which I use extensively in my notes — because I am an early adopter. Sometimes, part of being an early adopter is sacrificing backwards compatibility.
And sometimes being an early adopter means taking risks.
As an @obsdmd moderator, when I have time, I test alpha builds so that Insiders are more likely to have a positive beta testing experience.
This occasionally blows up in my face and costs me time, but I don't mind.
Earlier this week, I performed an incredibly dangerous sync maneuver that corrupted my own vault — to see what would happen and have a better report for Licat. I had backups in triplicate, but the point here is that I am willing to do risky things & then take the time to fix it.
I don't use Sanctum because I expect it to be relaxing in the sense that it's "stable," I use Sanctum because it is relaxing in the sense that I don't have to fix my own problems — the developer is responsive, which means iterating quickly, and sometimes that breaks things.
There is serenity in knowing that your feedback will be listened to. It's not really the features that have me all-in on @readwiseio — it's that @deadly_onion responds to every single piece of feedback I give him about the Reader app.
He doesn't always agree, but he listens :P
I know a lot of people really want access to Reader, because Reader is great. But one of the reasons it's still in a closed beta is because they are iterating fast and breaking things in some moderately disruptive ways still.
For people who depend on their software to "just work," breaking changes are catastrophically disruptive.
I am weird in that I get an incredible sense of relaxation from using software where the dev will listen to me, because it means I rarely have to learn to fix it myself.
I'm comfortable waiting and working around broken things because I would rather sit in a kitchen and work while contractors are building out custom cabinets than be stuck in a quiet kitchen where the cabinet doors are broken & I do not have time to fix them — THAT is stressful.
PS: My cousin came over & fixed my cabinet doors last week. He crossed a ton of really dumb little things off my to-do list & I almost wept with gratitude. The fact that I am physically capable of spackling screwholes and adding silicon caulk to a pipe fitting is not the point.
In some ways, what software to use is a question of what you find relaxing and enjoyable. I would rather use Obsidian than more "stable" software that I can't trust to get fixed, but that's not a choice everyone makes.
Enterprise uses OneNote for a reason, yanno? Sanctum let me deprecate my theme, Palatinate, because its dev was the fist person to implement all the features I care about. That's priceless to me.
If sometimes I have to be like "heyyyyy I needed that" when there's a feature update I wasn't expecting, or I need to swap in my own preferred fonts because I have a slightly different aesthetic preference — that's still better than having to update Palatinate for Live Preview.
The tl;dr here is that I will always use occasionally janky software with a response dev I like over stable software that doesn't do literally everything I could ever want, that's like, who I am as a person.
It's foundational to why I use @obsdmd instead of MediaWiki.