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.

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

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.

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.

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.