Why does the desktop app store notes in plain text?

Disagree. Do not give the false sense of security of obsfucating the text. If you’re logged in, it’s going to be decrypted when you use it no matter what, thats how computers workl. It’s still going to be stored unencryped in ram, in the pagefiles of the virtual RAM, electron cache, all kinds of attack vectors. You dont want a 2 person team designing security. Just encrypt your hard drive at the operating system level. Then you know it’s proper encryption. You don’t want every app developer being trusted to implement their own hacky idea of encryption - you want a centralized solution with thousands of professional eyes on the code. You’d be surprised how much of your password protected private website account data can be extracted from your browser cache, and apps you think are encrypted that can be hacked with simple tools. If you’re worried about your Linux laptop being stolen, the solution everyone will tell you, and is required at any decent workplace, is full drive decryption at login. The performance hit is negligible. My Debian laptop asks for a password at boot to decrypt the HDD, then I can get to the login screen. That cannot be hacked with any known methods (or course nothings safe from unknown zerodays, but it’s the best you can do, and SHA256 isnt expected to ever be hacked short of some quantum computing breakthrough 100 years from now).