People are wow’d by the features of Obsidian however it comes at a significant cost of usability. I love using Bear too and btw they are supporting backlinks with 2.0 which just hit public beta.
Also Obsidian weirds me out that they will not have a third-party security audit + give full access to plugins. Bear had Cossack Labs help implement their E2EE which is great for peace of mind.
Props to Reflect for their security audit too. I will be keeping an eye on how they progress.
I've been using Roam but seems like development is stalled. I'm mostly happy with it as is but I see a lot more people talking about Obsidian, wonder what I'm missing.
Roam was slow as hell when I tried it. And there have been reports of terrible behaviour from their founder that I don't want to condone, so don't use it in principle.
However most of what you get from this, you can get from Obsidian as well. Despite that Obsidian never stuck for me while Reflect kinda did.
These days I am back to Bear since it's free, native, fast and editing experience is top notch and I never found much use of bidirectional links.
It really has to be some kind of behavioural trait that makes some of us try every notes app out there.