While I’m a big fan of Vim, it’s definitely not for everyone.

I spend about half of my writing time in VSCodium, which is a community-based release of Microsoft’s open source VS Code editor. There are several markdown, grammar, and focus-oriented plugins for the platform, and you can pretty much shape it into whatever kind of editor you want.

I use VSCodium for the vast majority of my personal notes, technical writing, and project documentation (nearly all of which are written in markdown format).

Norka, Apostrophe, Obsidian

Typst

You can use their online web-editor (similar to OverLeaf for LaTeX) or download the open-source engine and run it locally (there are extensions available for many text editors).

Compared to LaTeX I find it much more comfortable to work with. It comes with sane, modern defaults and doesn’t need any plugins just to generate a (localized) bibliography or include links.

Since Typst is very young compared to LaTeX I’m sure that there are numerous docs / workflows that can’t be reproduced at the moment but if you don’t need some special feature I’d recommend giving it a shot.

There is still an older version of Scrivener available for free, from when they were beta testing it on Linux. It still worked well last time I checked. The Windows version also runs really well in WIne, although it takes a bit of setting up initially.

Any text editor that lets you write Markdown (all of them, since markdown can be written as a plain text file). It’s simple but featureful. I would recommend Marktext.

I recommend Obsidian with community plugins. Application itself isn’t open-source but your content stored as markdown files.

Norka looks interesting. Also, Apostrophe, Obsidian

If you are looking for microsoft compatibility check OnlyOffice, its amazing

Neovim

Kile( by KDE ) if you know latex.

Others are recommending Obsidian (which I have no experience with, it may be the right way to go).

Myself, I chose Logseq on a whim a year or two ago and haven’t looked back. In the backend you get a nicely composed set of plain-ol’ markdown files that you can cp/edit/merge as needed.

I would have said Doom Emacs but given your note about vim, I’m assuming it wouldn’t be a great fit for you. Still, I used to write in Darkroom on Windows, because I really liked the totally minimal and simplistic nature of it, and Doom Emacs with writeroom-mode is a perfect upgrade.

As for other alternatives, it all depends on your own taste. I don’t think the issue here is really the amount of apps, just finding the right one. You mentioned Writer sends you on a constant formatting spree, so maybe a text editor would fit you better than a word processor like Writer.

In that case, I suggest you look at something that would resemble notepad. Lite XL is my favourite notepad-like text editor but I don’t think it’s usually available as a package. You can also try Gnome Editor as it is essentially Gnome’s answer to the lack of a super-minimalist app like MS notepad on linux. People have mentioned Obsidian and while it’s nice, if you’re not going to be using Obsidian’s graph or linking features I’d say you’re better off with a simpler markdown editor, Marktext is pretty nice imo. Sublime text is another good option for customizability, ease of use, and minimalism (Although not FOSS if that matters to you, neither is Obsidian for that matter).

You can also try and find a port of the original darkroom, as far as minimalism goes it really gets it right.

Overall, from what I can gather from your post, I suggest you use Marktext or LiteXL, if possible. Try out one of the other mentioned apps if those don’t fit your workflow.

Edit: For clarification, these are my suggestions for writing, formatting is a completely different practice and might need other tools.

FocusWriter for a minimalist, focused writing experience. You can edit the existing template for a dark theme and white text. I rather like the typewriter font, Liberation Mono (it was Courier something back on Windows). Give it a try. I’ve been using it for around 3-4 years.

Not vim necessarily, but I would really suggest thinking about a plain text editor of your choice and some of those lightweight markup languages (Markdown itself, reStructuredText, ASCIIDoc … I prefer rST, but they are mostly the same). Exactly because it allows me to concentrate on the content and ignore formatting. Besides, formatting, do you write for print or as everybody else these days for HTML? Why do you need a large word processor which is build primarily for preparing documents for print? Every serious text editor has some kind of plugins with spellcheckers, grammar checkers, dictionaries, etc.

If you base your opinion of vim from memes you are missing out. Anyone who can’t take 10 minutes to type vimtutor in their terminal is not someone to base an opinion on. These memes come mostly from impatient people that can’t read the docs. It’s a fantastic text editor.

That being said, it’s not meant to be used for written words it’s meant to write code and config files. You want to look for a word processor.

Abiword, etherpad, focuswciter are probably the next 3 biggest on Linux behind libre and open office.

Personally I prefer markdown for most things these days but it’s not exactly meant for word processing either.