Standard Notes, the encrypted, open source note taking app, is now available as a Snap application on the Snapcraft store.

This means it’s now super easy to install the productivity tool on Linux distributions like Ubuntu and Manjaro.

Not familiar with Standard Notes? It’s a cross-platform note taking tool available for all major desktop operating systems, as well as mobile and web.

Using it you can create multiple notes, apply tags, search, and sync your stuff between devices securely, using end-to-end-encryption.

Standard Notes is open source and free to use, and you can even run your own self-hosted server. An “extended” plan is available for those who want to support the project, its development, and its ideas on how to do to dos.

Standard Notes Extended costs from $9.99 a month (though you have the option of paying for 5 years upfront, saving you 75%) and offers some compelling extras in return including:

Additional editors, including markdown, code, WSIYWG

Additional themes

Daily backups delivered to email or cloud provider

Privacy conscious, students, as well as the severely organised will no doubt find the monthly subscription more than reasonable given the capabilities offered.

But the tools available for free accounts, which I imagine most of you will evaluate the app on, is a little …Shall we say, lacking?

A no-frills text editor

You can create as many notes and tags as you want with a free account but you can’t apply any sort of text formatting to your note. Or insert images. Or create links. Or cross-reference your notes.

For free users Standard Notes is effectively a securely syncing plain text editor. For many this might be more than enough.

Free accounts also get access to auto-saving, note revisions (history), as well as note archiving, pinning and locking.

Other open source options

Am I the target audience for this (and similar) apps? Probably not. I don’t takes notes very often, and when I do I don’t need to do anything particularly clever with them besides add links and make lists.

Other open source note taking tools like include SimpleNote (made by the makers of WordPress) and Joplin (an oft-recommended free alternative to Evernote) but these lack some of Standard Notes’s more assured selling points, like encryption, self-hosting, and note revisions.

Install Standard Notes (Snap)

Standard Notes is free, open source software available to download for all major operating systems from the project website and from Github.

You can install the Standard Notes on Ubuntu as a Snap app from the Snapcraft Store. Press this button to open the app listing in the Ubuntu Software app:

Click to install Standard Notes

Alternatively, install Standard Notes from the command line on Snap-supported Linux distros by running:

sudo snap install standard-notes

Once installed, you’ll need to register for an account using a valid e-mail address.

Be aware that, due to the encryption assurances, you cannot reset your account password should you forget it so please pick something secure but also eminently memorable!