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.

adding Quillpad, as another alternative

QR is just image to text, most QR reading apps I have used, show you the QR content before going to the website (or let you disable opening the link directly) so you should be able to check the URL or content and see if the link is legit or not.

But let’s be honest most people don’t know or don’t even bother and that’s the real problem.

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.

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

It seems to be a 3-day thing from the information on the modlog, but I would first try to talk to the moderators before trying to post on the same community again, maybe clarifying that you are the original author, and you plan to maintain/update them, or that maybe the title should not include [old guide] or something like that, and that the purpose of these post is to share information, get feedback and generate discussion on these games, as you do play them.

but then that would overlap once the individual games have their own communities

You can always cross-post or tell people where to find the guides later.

If you search the modlog of lemmy.world with your name, you can see what the mod of /c/games said, what I can see is that it was taken as spam of old guides and/or not original content on that community, and they allow only a certain type of posts on that specific community.

There is no general modmail, so any mod can respond on Lemmy (at least yet), but you could DM the mods of the community individually to talk to them and see what is acceptable or not.

Remember that as it was the case on Reddit, there is the site rules and the community rules, sometimes some communities don’t allow certain things, or maybe they can think content can be spam or not original content.

Here you have multiple /c/games (or different names) communities on different instances, so if one doesn’t allow some types of post, another existing one can, or a new one can be created, or even you can create another /c/games.

It is true that here there are a lot of specific game communities that don’t exist yet but there is always the chance someone or yourself can create a community to fill what is missing (for example a /c/gameguides could be a new community for that type of content and be a hub for guides, specially for those games that doesn’t have a community yet).

Another thing, remember that the fact that you migrated from Reddit doesn’t mean that people will follow if you link to Lemmy even if you clarify that there is an updated version here, and content could be deleted from either Reddit or Lemmy side at any time, so even if it is as an alternative/backup I would consider having those guides on a third place (like docs that you mentioned, and link them somewhere on your posts).

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.