I don't use Roam but just read an interesting article about somebody who uses it. As said above it seems a good software to prepare a paper, an article or a book: linear thinking, but necessary linear thinking in order to communicate with others verbally or in writing.

However, the reason I got curious in Roam in the first place was for note taking and organizing reading notes. At the end of a book I end up with a large collection of quotes and personal notes, that are all in a Word document that I store in TB (I don't use the Note tab for this, not sure why. It works with Word). Then I try to extract the most useful quotes from the Word document and paste them as thoughts in TB under whichever keyword it relates to. It's time consuming and I thought maybe Roam would offer a more efficient way to do that (the author of the article just does that with the books he reads and has more that 180 book reviews on his site. So a good reference!)

The feature that interested me most was the way links were bidirectional. In TB, an hyperlink in a paragraph can open the related thought in the plex, however activating a thought in the plex will not find the paragraphs in the notes where there is an hyperlink to that thought (at least in v10, maybe in v11?).

Roam does that very well, you get the same fluidity in a linear textual presentation that TB offers in a visual presentation. It does that because there is a third way for displaying the information besides visual (as said in the thread TB does that much better), linear text (corresponding to the Note tab in TB): searching for a term will display all the information entered in Roam, without making a distinction if is a Page (=a thought) or a text (=a note).

Furthermore, the search engine allows linking a paragraph to a "page" (=thought) when it is not yet done (the link button at the right):

So basically Roam's advantage for managing notes is due to its search engine, the outline structure of the notes, the bidirectional links, and the report format (as shown in the two screenshots above). This allows a writer, a researcher, any person dealing with text to extract all the relevant information from their knowledge base and create an ouline for their writing.

The outline structure of the notes is very important because each bullet point is an information unit (corresponding to a thought in TB). So when searching for a word, it finds each paragraph that has the word. The equivalent for TB would be that the search box would return not only the thoughts that have the word in the name, but also every paragraph in the notes that have the term. Then, Roam shows the result in a separate page, with the possibility to jump to the notes where the paragraph was extracted. It's actually quite a smart way to avoid the linear rigidity of notes.

As for TB users, I am one of those who appreciate its unique visual qualities and the fun to constantly tend the plex, each time with a deeper understanding of my subject. However, I can see how the Note tab (v10) does not allow the same level of flexibility. Pasting reading notes in the Note tab has been basically no more than a dump for me. If TB searches the content of notes, it's just a list of notes that have the words (there could be tens). What do you do after that? Roam's bidirectional links, its outline structure and its reporting formats give a chance for the content of the notes to be found, combined and reused in personal thinking.

We could, however, quite easily see further evolution for the Note tab in TB. It could behave, not just as a text editor, but as a way to display information in a more flexible manner: outline indented structure, paragraphs as information units, hyperlinking to thoughts but also to other paragraphs in other notes (again maybe v11 does already all this). With the possibility to search TB and get reports that would present the results from both sources: the paragraphs extracted from the Notes and the thoughts that have the term. That would bring the flexibility of the plex inside the notes.