As far as I know, CasaOS (same as Cockpit) is installed on top of a default OS install, so you could always access the OS directly to install/configure things outside of it, if the need arises.

I would not say you would be held back by it, if it does what you need. And for what I can see online, you can install any docker container even if it’s not on the default catalog of CasaOS, or access the OS.

If you want to grow your knowledge of how things work, or how to deploy services without CasaOS, you can always do so in parallel of using CasaOS, so I don’t see where the issue could be.

What would you recommend that is not NixOS or a Bash script and can be used agnostic of distro?

This is not correct as pass uses GPG, and you can do symmetric encryption with it, it is just a different parameter in the command.

You can use a different password per file, or the same one

I use qtpass as a GUI for pass

Can I use it fully offline?

Yes, it is fully offline, you can back it up by any mean you could any other file, and it should be fine as the files are encrypted (should store the keys separated), can be a USB, an external drive, another computer in your LAN, a git repo, nextcloud, syncthing.

How do I back it up to USB drive?

You copy and paste the files

What does the day-to-day operation of Pass compared to Keepass look like?

As I said I use qtpass as a GUI so, open qtpass, search for the specific password file, double click, put the password for my gpg key and then the password I need is stored in clipboard for 30sec (this is customizable or can be disabled) and I paste it where I need it.

If I need to store a new password, just use the add password button, and input the data, it is that simple.

I’m going to mention Ansible as I haven’t seen it mentioned, and it can be used to locally manage a reproducible build.

It has already been mentioned, but as a minimum to replicate your system you need two things:

• Transfer/copy your entire /home directory as there is where the majority of the configuration files of your system pertaining the software you use (there could be configs you could need on /etc and on /usr/local or other dir), that is why it is recommended to partition your disk on installation of your distro, so the /home directory is already separated, as if you reinstall in the same machine you don’t lose any configuration in addition to your personal documents/pictures/etc
• Have a way to automatically install a list of programs/apps/drivers/libraries, and that is what something like a bash script, Ansible, nixOs, etc. could help you with.

The truth is that using any of the tools in the second point requires learning a bunch, so if your skill level is still not there, there is some work to do to get there.

Old laptop, Debian with docker running nextcloud, navidrome, jellyfin, gitea, librespeed, wireguard, dnsmasq, and nginx as a reverse proxy.

I recommend DuckDNS as well, you can run it both sides and set up a daemon to update the domain when there is an IP change automatically.

And with Wireguard you can set up a tunnel between both locations so you can share anything you need.

I’m using Debian, with Docker and running Jellyfin, Nextcloud, Navidrome and Wireguard on Containers on my old laptop. So that would be my suggestion.

You could install CasaOS and/or Portainer, on top of Debian if you want an easier way to manage your server and containers.

If you are not behind a CGNAT, it should be as easy as opening the necessary ports.

I have a reverse proxy running in ports 80, 443 and can safely access Jellyfin on a subdomain without issues from outside my LAN.

Markdown (there are plenty of editors to chose from) + Pandoc (to generate the output in multiple formats), would be my recommendation.

Did you know https://m.lemmy.world?, voyager can be used on desktop.

I use my old laptop as a server, and so far no issues with leaving it on 24/7

Been doing the same, just leaving my password-store offline, for me this is enough.

For me personally, when you reach a level where you can think, and communicate in the non-native language (without doing mental translations back and forth) with enough ease and speed, no mater the topic at hand (meaning that even if you don’t know a technical or specific word you can make yourself understood), and even if you make grammatical mistakes or have an accent, the point of the conversation is not lost between participants, then you can consider yourself fluent enough on said language.

My native tongue is Spanish (could you tell if I didn’t mention it?), but I have consumed so much content throughout (and yes I did check how to spell throughout) my life only in English and practiced enough doing conversations both writing and speaking (even with an accent) on the internet that I can communicate with ease and be understood.

I have visited the United States a handful of times for around a month for vacations with family, so I can say that I had to communicate with native people outside the internet now, but I haven’t had any formal education except a few very basic English courses in high school.

I have dual boot Manjaro/Windows, but honestly I haven’t used the windows partition in two years except for the very occasional moment I need to check if a document format is alright to send to someone, or anyone else not familiar with Linux needs to do something.

Just so you know it is possible, you can probably disable sleep or other things the laptop does by default when you close the lid, so you can leave it running while the lid is closed.

Did this with my old Dell laptop (that is running Debian server now), and now I access it over ssh while the lid is closed and very rarely open the lid and do stuff on the actual device directly.

I know it is not the main topic of discussion but, there is a discussion on Github about multi communities, if you have a GitHub account please upvote it, or you could add a bounty to it.

I never cared about reputation/karma (I have around 400 points on 11 years of activity on Reddit), I always ignored user scores, and focused on post and comment scores.

The thing that was annoying was when you couldn’t participate on something because you didn’t have enough points.