Hearth solved my biggest Obsidian complaint by making homepage layouts completely drag

Key Points:

• The author switched from Google Keep to Obsidian for note-taking, appreciating Obsidian's plain Markdown files and project-specific vaults but struggled with its default homepage always reopening the last note, which often lacked project context.
• Traditional solutions using Markdown notes as homepages required multiple plugins, CSS tweaks, and frequent fixes after updates, making the setup fragile and cumbersome.
• The Hearth plugin significantly improved the experience by allowing drag-and-drop layout building without coding, customizable boards per project, and integrated cards for search, daily notes, tasks, and statistics, all managed through an intuitive interface.
• Hearth is a new, rapidly evolving open-source plugin with frequent updates and some instability, especially on mobile, but it offers a much better and more maintainable homepage solution than manual CSS and query customizations.
• After weeks of use, the author finds Hearth reliable across Obsidian updates, appreciates its mobile launcher, and considers it a valuable, though still developing, tool that makes their vault homepage feel intentionally designed rather than patched together.