I mentioned back in July that I'd started experimenting with Obsidian as a PKM. I'm still using it, and liking it a lot. It's the right balance of lightweight and freeform but with enough features around linking, search, and graphing that I find myself using it more and more in preference to Notepad++.
Notepad++ remains a more powerful editor overall, and there are things that I find myself needing to do quite regularly in there in preference to Obsidian (like editing multiple lines, doing macro edits, applying RegEx-driven changes) -- but this doesn't feel like an issue at all, because I can jump straight out from a note into Obsidian into Notepad++ with just a couple of clicks.
For my day job, I'm still using Notepad++ more. There's less interlinking and need for a 'knowledge base' right now in the things that I work on, and my preference for smaller rolling project work is to use folder structures in Windows/Dropbox that store all the information for a project in one place. If I'm doing something major and long term, I'll generally spin up specific project spaces for it, but for smaller stuff, it's much more expedient and useful just to throw a bunch of web links, text documents, and other media into a sorted folder hierarchy.
I've sprung for a month of Obsidian Sync to try it out. I do find this mildly annoying. I pay for Dropbox and have had zero problems so far syncing Obsidian Vaults between Windows machines using it. I also already use some apps on my phone which just hook into arbitrary Dropbox folders. There may be some technical angle that I'm missing, but I don't see why the Obsidian mobile app can't just hook into my Vault and handle sync via Dropbox.
I don't, in fact, resent paying for software. Obsidian is very good and fits my needs very well. The mobile app is also excellent. That doesn't come free, or even cheap. But there's a mental disconnect for me in paying for a subscription for something that, on paper in terms of what it's meant to offer, I feel duplicates another service that I pay for. The cost for Sync would be ~90% of what I pay for Dropbox, which is a far more generalised service in terms of where it meets my needs.
This is a mental blocker, rather than anything else. In many ways, I'd rather pay a more nebulous generalised service fee than for something that feels unnecessary. But maybe I just need to write it off as not really paying for the Sync service as much as paying to support good software development.
(I was having reasonable success using my existing lightweight text editor on my phone, Byword, which connects to Dropbox folders. I could edit and read my Obsidian notes with only medium friction using this, which was just about fine for my needs. As I've used more of Obsidian's specific features, that's become less desirable though. And for some reason, my Byword seems to have entirely lost its ability to pull in system-level usability features like autocorrect, word suggestion, dynamic key sizing, etc., which has made it considerably less usable.)