@pie I think to know the difference between Obsidian and Joplin, you could try them both. They're both free and for education you can use Obsidian for free license-wise, so that's not an issue.

Last time I used Joplin (uh.. half year to a year ago now?) their plugins were still kind of limited. They were mostly stuff that Obsidian usually already has as default.

Joplin tagging is more an afterthought in my opinion. It was really hard to do more with the tags than just tagging them.

And I absolutely loved the backlinking. That way you can make a note per subject and link together.

But I'm seriously shit at explaining this.. I just know there are a lot of academia using Obsidian. I use it for totally different things, but my impression is that Obsidian is pretty neat for students.

Additional advantage is that Obsidian stores all files in .md (markdown) files, so if you wanted to you can use those files in other software as well. Joplin stores them in a database (which can be encrypted).

And I'm not sure anymore how Joplin synces with your phone lately (they were busy moving from one system to another when I used it) whereas with Obsidian you could sync using any sync tool you please since they're just .md files.

Erm.. yeah I probably made a mess of this explanation. My best suggestion is to just try Obsidian and see if you'd like it or not. Or just ignore me, but at least I've tried to explain. 😅

@pie I've read that SyncThing is supposed to be pretty good. Someone else suggested FolderSync. I'm using NextCloud but somehow Obsidian can't write to my SD card (Android 8 here, maybe that's the problem, I still have to check). So I'll probably try one of those as well. Then there's also the native Obsidian Sync but that's not free.