It is. The differece is that Silverbullet is self-hosted and not in app like Obsidian. The basics are the same, Obsidian has a way bigger community and more plugins, Silverbullet is easier to extend due to using Lua. Lastly, Silverbullet has queries built in, in Obsidian you have to use Dataview. If you need a markdown-based note storing system Silverbullet is great. Obsidian has more bling and customizability, but is not self-hostable.

Love me some Will Crichton. Great talk and although this is a summary of his work and not a new tool, it is great to have it all in one place and concisely explained.

The group I did my PhD in used eLabFTW after I was gone. I heard only positive things and am trying to implement it in my current job (can not really selfhost as the IT department does all services). It should have a system to log experiments as well as have basic (maybe even more) inventory management. As far as I remember it dous not need any “big” hardware, so just using an older computer with a good backup strategy should work fine.