I have been using LS since it was in the alpha testing phase. I searched my graphs and the earliest I have seen is March 21, 2021, but it may be earlier than this because LS has caused me to lose data several times in history. LS is an excellent open source software. The passionate developers and good community make it like a star. During the three years, I accumulated about 1,000 pages and used it almost every weekday. In the early days, I even wrote a tutorial article about LS queries, but recently I decided to leave LS. To be honest, I was very reluctant, but some problems with LS forced me to make this choice. I thought seriously about why I left LS, and here are the reasons I listed:
- Performance lag, it takes half a minute to re-index more than 900 pages.
- The mobile app is almost unusable. Every time you open it, you need to manually index it and then wait for half a minute before you can input, which almost cuts off the scenario of portable input on the mobile terminal. (I use iCloud synchronization)
- Lack of a directory view (all files/notes). LS cancels the concept of folders and replaces them with pages/tags, but there is no unified management page for tags, so it is even difficult to know what tags are currently available. The all-page function is also a joke. My current note library has 41 pages after opening, and there is only a simple search input box. Therefore, LS currently has almost no global management perspective (ignoring the difficult and ugly global map perspective). Even if you manually make one on the sidebar, it needs to occupy the directory of the sidebar, and all need to be maintained manually. The consequence of the lack of unified hierarchical/content management is that if a note is not recorded in the directory of the sidebar, it is almost impossible to find it later.
- Continuing the previous point, the daily diary page is very good, and stress-free input is also very good, but the diaries accumulated over three years make it very difficult for me to retrieve them. In addition to sliding in the waterfall flow to view the data, I have not found a better way. Because the content recorded in the daily diary is different.
- There is a bug in drawing. The position where the mouse is clicked is different from the corresponding position on the page. This bug appears from time to time, which is annoying. I don’t know if anyone else has encountered this.
- There are bugs in the selection. When selecting content across bullets, other bullets cannot be selected, which is ==very annoying==.
- Rough. Some features are still in development and have been used as release versions, such as the very discouraging search/advanced search function, and page property. The input method is very rough. I think these features are more suitable for pre-release versions for those who are interested to try.
- The new database version is almost incompatible with the old version, and I feel very confused and lack confidence in future updates.
In general, it is the poor UX that forced me to leave LS. Once I tried to do something serious with LS, it always gave me feedback with various strange bugs, telling me that it is still an unstable beta version. I know that for an open source project and a small development team, it is difficult (and there is no obligation) to consider all the details. But as a note-taking software, data and information are priceless to me. These bugs prevent me from entering information normally and using the information I recorded normally. I think these basic usability should be a passing line.
LS’s enthusiastic developers have brought it fast releases and bug fixes, but also brought some (in my opinion) developer-driven problems: lack of designed UX and UI, overly complicated usage (if you want certain features of LS, you have to understand how LS implements these features), and ordinary users are at a loss when faced with various development-level ids and codes… I sincerely suggest that LS spend more time on performance and details. It is already at the forefront of its competitors in terms of functionality.
I wish LS better and better in the future.
