2026-05-09
Getting Off Apple Notes on Linux (It's More Annoying Than It Should Be)
Apple Notes is perfectly serviceable as a notes app: it's fast, it syncs reliably across Apple devices, and it stays out of your way until you need it. The problem shows up the moment you start spending serious time on Linux, because Apple Notes simply doesn't exist there. There's no Linux client, no usable web interface, and no straightforward export path that doesn't require a Mac somewhere in the process, which makes it a quiet dead end for anyone splitting time across ecosystems.
This is exactly the situation I found myself in after switching my desktop over to Arch Linux running Omarchy, with all my notes sitting inaccessible on Apple hardware.
Exporting from Apple Notes
Worth knowing upfront: you cannot export from your iPhone or iPad in any meaningful bulk sense, so you'll need to be at a Mac to do this. Once you are, open Notes, select everything you want to export, and go to File → Export as PDF, which gives you one PDF per note. It's not an ideal format if you want to edit things later, but it works well enough if your goal is simply to preserve old notes for reference rather than carry on writing in them.
If you'd prefer editable files, the app Exporter (available on the Mac App Store for around $6) is the cleaner option, converting your notes to .md files that you can take almost anywhere. Either way, the Mac is a hard requirement and there's no getting around it.
Why I Didn't Go with Obsidian
Obsidian was the obvious candidate given how widely used it is and how well it fits the kind of plain-text, Linux-friendly workflow I was after. When I actually sat down with it, though, it became clear pretty quickly that it was more tool than I needed. I'm not trying to build a linked knowledge base or run a suite of community plugins or maintain a graph of interconnected ideas — I just need somewhere to write things down and find them again later, which is a much simpler ask than what Obsidian is really designed for.
The sync situation also adds friction that feels out of proportion for something as simple as notes, since you're either paying for Obsidian Sync or setting up Syncthing or Git yourself, both of which are perfectly reasonable options but represent real effort to configure correctly. I landed on Simplenote instead, which is free, syncs automatically through an account with no additional setup, and does exactly what it says without asking anything more of you.
Getting Simplenote Running on Arch (This Took a While)
Installing Simplenote is straightforward enough since it's available as simplenote-electron-bin through the AUR, but getting it to actually produce a visible window on Hyprland turned out to be a different problem entirely. After installing and running simplenote from the terminal, the output was this:
Checking for beta autoupdate feature for deb/rpm distributions
Found package-type: pacman
APPIMAGE env is not defined, current application is not an AppImage
And then nothing at all, with no window appearing and no error to work from. Running verbose logging showed that Electron was starting up correctly and the renderer was navigating through its usual lifecycle events, with RenderViewReady firing as expected, but Hyprland never received a window to manage. Running hyprctl clients while the process was alive confirmed it: Simplenote wasn't in the client list at all, meaning the app was running entirely headlessly without ever creating a visible Wayland surface.
The fix is to force it through XWayland rather than native Wayland:
/opt/Simplenote/simplenote --ozone-platform=x11That produced a window immediately. To make the fix permanent without it being overwritten on the next package update, copy the desktop file to your user directory and edit it there:
mkdir -p ~/.local/share/applications
cp /usr/share/applications/simplenote.desktop ~/.local/share/applications/Then open the copy, find the Exec= line, and update it from:
Exec=/opt/Simplenote/simplenote %U
to:
Exec=/opt/Simplenote/simplenote --ozone-platform=x11 %U
After saving that, Simplenote will launch correctly from your app launcher and the fix will survive package updates without any further attention.
Where Things Landed
The whole process took considerably longer than it should have, partly because the Wayland surface issue isn't documented anywhere obvious and required some digging to diagnose, and partly because the Linux note-taking ecosystem tends to assume you either want something fully-featured like Obsidian or you're happy enough with a web app. Simplenote occupies a useful middle ground between those options, and once the --ozone-platform=x11 flag is in place it works without any further fuss.
I love Simplenote, it's simple (as in the name) and is cross platform for free, supports markdown, and is a no-fuss application. Love love love.