I used this for taking notes last semester, and I think it's the best free software option right now. The UI is intuitive and, more importantly, the drawing feels good.
The absolute best might still be Styluslabs Write, which has very nice editing capabilities and I prefer its "pencil case" tool model (you have multiple tools with colour, shape, hardness, etc.). But it's closed source, doesn't run natively under Wayland, and I like Rnote's smoothing more.
I tried a whole bunch of the these apps, and I decided that Xournal++ [1] is better than Rnote for note taking. However, I have used Openboard [2] for teaching online since 2020.
I agree that Rnote's smoothing is better, but its tool selection UX is terrible. There are three different bars (top, bottom, and side), and you often need to move your mouse/hand to all of them across the screen in order to select the right tool. In Xournal++ I can put everything on the top bar.
Xournal++ has it's own problems. Pasting an image always makes it so big, that resizing to the correct size is difficult. It also doesn't have a laser pointer, which is why I can't use it for teaching. Creating a new document with the correct template is also painful.
Honestly, in another life, I would write a decent note-taking app.
Yeah, also wanted to suggest Stylus labs' app. Don't use a tablet much at present, but two years ago this was the best software I found.
Besides selecting/manipulating with rectangle/lasso/intersection selections, handwritten text that is roughly level with the page rules can be deleted/moved by using the stylus as a "cursor." It understands punctuation and descenders and works surprisingly well. Text that is pushed too far to the right even "reflows" to the next line. The site [1] has a good explanation of how this works.
Rnote looks nice too though. I wonder if it'll be able to match the UX of Write.
~~Unfortunately doesn't implement expand/contract vertical space (insert or remove vertical space).~~ Ages ago when I used a Toshiba tablet laptop to do math this was a real killer feature in xournal (https://xournal.sourceforge.net/ | https://xournalpp.github.io/)
I found out about this software way too late, but converting from Xournal to Rnote was not hard luckily. Since then this is among the first apps I install on my 2in1 and I urge anyone using Xournal to give this one a try.
I wonder which one of them has the better performance (battery life), this might be an interesting marketing point
I used to do a LOT of handwritten notetaking on top of existing PDFs so if you're shopping around for apps I'd call out
https://pdfexpert.com/ which to date has the best handwriting recognition I've seen. Plus I they're Ukrainian so bonus points for helping support that economy
I recently tested Rnote(Rust) and Saber(Flutter)[1] with a wacom tablet; RNote is minimalist, gets the job done while Saber does some post-processing to make the note prettier, has lot of features and even makes sounds of pen writing on the paper which creates some latency.
Unfortunately Saber crashes when I move to another window and could not even report it to Gnome; Too bad as I do like flutter & dart lang but I don't think the runtime is stable enough for linux.
Having onenote erase a days worth of work because it couldn't sync my tablet (and there was no way of exporting it as pdf or anything else) this looks really interesting. Hope there is an android version eventually.
Found this app https://github.com/saber-notes/saber in an earlier thread about this, and at first glance it looks amazing. Multi plattform, you can sync and its easy to save as pdf.
Readit News
The absolute best might still be Styluslabs Write, which has very nice editing capabilities and I prefer its "pencil case" tool model (you have multiple tools with colour, shape, hardness, etc.). But it's closed source, doesn't run natively under Wayland, and I like Rnote's smoothing more.
I agree that Rnote's smoothing is better, but its tool selection UX is terrible. There are three different bars (top, bottom, and side), and you often need to move your mouse/hand to all of them across the screen in order to select the right tool. In Xournal++ I can put everything on the top bar.
Xournal++ has it's own problems. Pasting an image always makes it so big, that resizing to the correct size is difficult. It also doesn't have a laser pointer, which is why I can't use it for teaching. Creating a new document with the correct template is also painful.
Honestly, in another life, I would write a decent note-taking app.
[1] https://github.com/xournalpp/xournalpp/
[2] https://github.com/OpenBoard-org/OpenBoard/
Besides selecting/manipulating with rectangle/lasso/intersection selections, handwritten text that is roughly level with the page rules can be deleted/moved by using the stylus as a "cursor." It understands punctuation and descenders and works surprisingly well. Text that is pushed too far to the right even "reflows" to the next line. The site [1] has a good explanation of how this works.
Rnote looks nice too though. I wonder if it'll be able to match the UX of Write.
[1] https://www.styluslabs.com/
Demonstration: https://youtu.be/uxFRWpY5o8k?t=299
I used to do a LOT of handwritten notetaking on top of existing PDFs so if you're shopping around for apps I'd call out
https://pdfexpert.com/ which to date has the best handwriting recognition I've seen. Plus I they're Ukrainian so bonus points for helping support that economy
https://www.drawboard.com/ which is what I used for Windows
Unfortunately Saber crashes when I move to another window and could not even report it to Gnome; Too bad as I do like flutter & dart lang but I don't think the runtime is stable enough for linux.
[1] https://github.com/saber-notes/saber