I used this for taking notes last semester, and I think it's the best free software option right now. The UI is intuitive and, more importantly, the drawing feels good.
The absolute best might still be Styluslabs Write, which has very nice editing capabilities and I prefer its "pencil case" tool model (you have multiple tools with colour, shape, hardness, etc.). But it's closed source, doesn't run natively under Wayland, and I like Rnote's smoothing more.
I tried a whole bunch of the these apps, and I decided that Xournal++ [1] is better than Rnote for note taking. However, I have used Openboard [2] for teaching online since 2020.
I agree that Rnote's smoothing is better, but its tool selection UX is terrible. There are three different bars (top, bottom, and side), and you often need to move your mouse/hand to all of them across the screen in order to select the right tool. In Xournal++ I can put everything on the top bar.
Xournal++ has it's own problems. Pasting an image always makes it so big, that resizing to the correct size is difficult. It also doesn't have a laser pointer, which is why I can't use it for teaching. Creating a new document with the correct template is also painful.
Honestly, in another life, I would write a decent note-taking app.
Yeah, also wanted to suggest Stylus labs' app. Don't use a tablet much at present, but two years ago this was the best software I found.
Besides selecting/manipulating with rectangle/lasso/intersection selections, handwritten text that is roughly level with the page rules can be deleted/moved by using the stylus as a "cursor." It understands punctuation and descenders and works surprisingly well. Text that is pushed too far to the right even "reflows" to the next line. The site [1] has a good explanation of how this works.
Rnote looks nice too though. I wonder if it'll be able to match the UX of Write.
The absolute best might still be Styluslabs Write, which has very nice editing capabilities and I prefer its "pencil case" tool model (you have multiple tools with colour, shape, hardness, etc.). But it's closed source, doesn't run natively under Wayland, and I like Rnote's smoothing more.