Looking for a Linux bookmark manager
Sunday, March 16, 2025Today I read Lou Plummer's review of raindrop.io and finally took the plunge.
I'd been resistant to using raindrop because it is an entirely cloud-based solution, and I tend to prefer local-first with cloud backups than purely cloud-based apps. But it outclasses every other option so much in functionality.
The journey started from the basic observation that bookmarks in Firefox (and its forks) suck. The folder structure and workflow is based primarily around where the bookmark is accessible in the interface, rather than something more logical like the content of the bookmark. This means you have a folder for bookmarks that will appear in the toolbar, and a folder for bookmarks that will display in the bookmarks menu, and then a folder for "other bookmarks". This is such a ludicrous organisation system. Why not let the user define their folder structure, and then just have a checkbox attached to each record as to whether the bookmark should be included in the toolbar? It gets even worse when mobile is included in the mix. Bookmarks saved from the mobile browser are, again, segregated to a separate folder. Worse, tags are not even supported in the mobile browser.
I don't know how Mozilla thinks this is acceptable in 2025. Mobile is not a secondary device for many users — it is their primary means to access the web. I probably do a majority of my recreational web-browsing in mobile. No access to tags just won't do.
There does not seem to be a great deal of options available for a bookmark manager on Linux. I first tried Linkwarden, which seemed okay, but the mobile version is lacking greatly. It's one of those apps that's actually just a website pretending to be an app, and there's no way to use Android's "Share" interface to save a link. Therefore, the only way to save a bookmark is to copy the url, load the "app", and paste it in. Maybe this wouldn't be so bad for some users, but I have an old slow phone. Leaving the browser, loading another app, and then going back to the browser was too much friction.
Next I tried Buku, a powerful CLI app for bookmarks, with optional browser-based GUI. It's a decent app, I enjoyed it. Organisation is entirely through tags, and one "positive" side effect was it forced me to go throuh my existing bookmarks and either delete them or tag them properly to make Buku actually useful. The big downside is not having any mobile option, and the slightly clunky experience of having to spin up a local server to use the web interface.
My next stop was perhaps a less obvious option: Zotero. Zotero is the goto app for academic researchers for saving and annotations references, and managing a bibliography. It has cloud backups, tagging, it saves local snapshots of any webpages and documents you save. It allows you to attach notes and other documents to each record, and can output citations in many different formats. I used it during my mathematical and teaching studies. Zotero has the potential to be my ideal bookmarks manager, but there are two downsides. One is that mobile is not currently well-supported (there is a closed beta version for Android), the other is that browser integration isn't great. There is an extension that allows you to add things to Zotero, but you can't use it to open links from Zotero, and it doesn't have any form of auto-completion for tags — so I was stuck trying to remember whether mathematical links were filed under #maths or #mathematics, whether cooking links are #recipe or #recipes, and so on.
Anyway, I installed raindrop.io, and I have to admit — the UX is first-class. Whether in the browser, on the desktop, or on mobile, it feels great. And while it isn't local-first, I can easily create local backups in an open format.