I absolutely love Obsidian except for one crucial flaw: no tabs. They've made every editor view a "pane", which means that on a laptop you can effectively only work on one or two files at a time. There's a plugin that adds tabs, but it's pretty awkward and not what you normally think of when you think of tabs. Otherwise, Obsidian is truly incredible.
Obsidian is not a replacement for Notion tho, no databases, a lot of custom configuration, no nice templates, etc... I can't take how slow Notion is, and I'm looking for a self-hosted replacement, but Obsidian is just not there yet, except for the note taking part, that I dont care about.
You can query Markdown files with the (third-party) Dataview plugin. Wrote about it here[0], very simple query syntax. Only tables and lists, but tables is the one I've used by far the most in Notion.
> no nice templates
Well you can always create your own. There's a first-party templates plugin[1] and a similar third-party one that also allows custom variables and has a showcase[2] (think: you can curl the weather and add it to your journal).
Having wrote that, your "a lot of custom configuration" definitely applies.
except,in Notion, you don't need 3rd party plugins, or "create your own" templates, you already have it out of the box, don't get me wrong tho, I don't love Notion, is very slow. The biggest problem I see with obsidian is, requires a lot of configuration, like you mentioned. I just want something that works.
All of your data is locally stored markdown text files with no lock in.
All of the amazing benefits of linked note taking without the downsides.