I really appreciate the flexibility that Obsidian offers to customise and advance the way that you setup a solid note-taking/learning workflow. However, I frequently find myself either wandering around to find solutions to new issues or adopting practices from others (forum, YT videos, blogs, etc) that I do not fully understand how they work. Most of them are usually highly technical that at the end I am not sure how far they actually improved knowledge acquisition and productivity.
So this can easily end up into a complex process involving searches in various sources (i.e. forum, discord, GitHub, reddit, Stack Exchange, etc.), dives into new rabbit holes, confusion by long documentation files, and in some cases be frustrated and resorting to taking notes in simpler apps.
What I’m trying to do
Suggestions:
Maybe having some suggested bundles of community plug-ins that are relevant for different categories of tasks?
Introduce a classification system (i.e. tags) in community plug-ins?
Brief tutorials or best-practices that would be oriented according to the level of technical knowledge a user has?
An inclusive Obsidian academy that will familiarise novice users with some pre-requisite skills (like YAML, regex, etc) and having a database with concise solutions to frequently-observed issues per level of understanding.
Most of what you request is already there, check the Obsidian community hub! Certainly, it is still work in progress, but as obsidian along with all its plugins, themes, etc. is constantly developing, that is quite natural.
This is a nice idea: when installing community plugins from the settings, allow to filter them by tags or categories. You could think of opening a feature request for this!
At the core, Obsidian is about about putting words in a file: you have something to write about; you write it. I suggest not losing sight of that.
It’s a common temptation, when starting with any new software, to tweak all the knobs, install all the add-ons, exercise all the options. But, maybe it’s best not to trick out Obsidian with plugins, themes, and geegaws. At least, not when getting started. So, I suggest getting rid of most or all of the plugins and just start using the out-of-the-box vanilla Obsidian as it is when it’s first installed. Write with that, for a while. If you run into a situation where you really really really need a tweaky feature, then turn it on or install it. It that doesn’t help, turn it off.