HelixNotes and Zorin OS

Posted by MadaboutDana
Mar 6, 2026 at 11:48 PM

Well! What fun I’m having in my spare time!

As some of you know, I regularly experiment with Linux as I seek to achieve my long-term goal—moving away from the big U.S. suppliers. But so far, my experiments have been frustrating. Even Linux Mint, which I installed in early 2025 and then, after a number of seriously frustrating weeks, uninstalled again, was much less impressive than I had been led to believe. But this year I’ve installed Zorin OS 18 on my very elderly MacBook Air (2013!)—and it has been a revelation! Not only has it given the Mac a new lease of life (much faster, much better power management), it also talks happily to my Android smartphone, and is exceedingly user-friendly to use. (Zorin OS has been around for over a decade, and can be found at zorin.com)

Yes, there are still some Linux-isms to sort out if you want to heavily customise your system, but the OS itself comes with a range of friendly layouts (including a Mac-alike one and a Windows 11-alike) and the “professional” version of the OS (which costs less than $50) comes with a slew of additional layouts. But actually, even just using the Core OS I’ve got my desktop to look and behave much like my MacBook Pro. And this means I can benefit from some of the excellent, open-source Linux software out there.

Such as cross-platform HelixNotes, which is a very pleasant three-pane note-taking system which is cross-platform (although not iOS-compatible, and only runs on MacOS in emulation mode) and very quick to launch. You’ll find it at helixnotes.com

And I’ve also reinstalled Tangent, a truly wonderful take on lateral outlining which is also available on other platforms (e.g. Mac), but runs best on Linux.

What works best of all, however, is good ole’ Obsidian, thanks to my Obsidian Sync subscription (with which, unlike some forum members, I’ve not yet had any issues). The great thing is, you can use apps like HelixNotes (or Octarine, or Typora, or any other Markdown editor) on the Obsidian repository, which means that if you’re only syncing a single Obsidian vault (which I am, because I’m a cheapskate), you can use these other editors to access any part of that vault as if it was a separate repository. HelixNotes is much faster to launch than Obsidian (as are a couple of other Markdown editors I’m experimenting with), so if I want to update my journal (which is just a small part of my main Obsidian Vault), I do so via HelixNotes rather than Obsidian itself. Providing I remember to launch Obsidian before shutting down the machine, any changes made in HelixNotes are automatically synced with the Obsidian server.

Because HelixNotes also has a very fast search function, I find myself using it as a kind of default high-speed editor. It doesn’t outline (in the sense of fold text) like Obsidian (many of those in this forum appear to be unaware that Obsidian now folds and unfolds just like Dynalist or Workflowy—all you have to do is indent a sentence or paragraph. Headings have folded/unfolded for several versions now, but the latest versions also support folding body text). But that’s a small price to pay in return for speed and convenience. For more in-depth editing, I just go back to Obsidian.

Uninstalling apps is also easy when running Zorin OS—almost everything is handled by the built-in “Software” app, which can install apps from a wide range of Linux repositories, but shows you when an app has been “verified” by the Zorin community. Because Zorin has been under development for a long time, but with the very specific aim of remaining user-friendly, the latest version is seriously stable, and is now attracting users who’ve been put off by Microsoft’s latest attempts to turn Windows into an advertising platform. It’s well worth a look—as is LibreOffice or the German proprietary office suite SoftMaker Office.

I’m typing this on my trusty MacBook Air! Which, I notice, does need a recharge, but has now been running for over 4 hours on a battery dating from 2013!

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