Your editor has long been a user of the Tomboy note-taking tool. Tomboy makes it easy to gather thoughts, organize them, and pull them up on demand; it is, beyond doubt, a useful productivity tool. But all is not perfect with Tomboy. Some people have complained about its faults for a while; Hubert Figuiere, instead, chose to do something about it in the form of the Gnote utility.

GNote is interesting is an interesting application because it is a sticky notes application which allows wiki-like syntax, linking, and so on. And it looks very much like Tomboy, as it’s a re-write of that application.

Gnote offers performance advantages over Tomboy, which is based on Novell's Mono

You might imagine that an application for desktop notes would be too commonplace to generate controversy. Yet when Hubert Figuiere created Gnote, a port of the GNOME application Tomboy to C++, controversy erupted immediately.

Tomboy does not fancy Gnote; Jo Shields keeps promoting Mono in Debian and Ubuntu

Fedora might get rid of Tomboy and have Gnote replace it

The new release of Gnote and its significance. A former Novell engineer has just released a new version of Gnote, whose great value we explained in [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]. The project is growing quickly because it's mostly a constructive port to Microsoft-independent grounds.

Response to disinformation about Gnote, a substitute to the Mono-encumbered Tomboy

Gnote was started on April 2009 with the goal of providing a Free Software implementation of Tomboy that doesn't rely on Mono.For our testing purposes, I installed Gnote 0.5.1 on Ubuntu Jaunty through a personal PPA. I would love to see it packaged in Ubuntu officially in the near future.