“personal” and “trustless” seem sort of at odds here. you want personal data, so you want personal storage.

what I recommend, if you have the time and energy, is to find another self-hoster you trust and be “backup buddies” with them. set up remote file storage on both your networks and send your backups to the other person’s server.

if you can’t find another self-hoster, then find a friend or family member you trust and mail them your backups on a physical disk.

11ty is my favorite! cross-platform, good defaults, built-in tag support, and just generally good learning curve.

My favorite static site generator by far is Eleventy, which you can learn by reading their sample code at eleventy-base-blog. It uses NodeJS which runs on all major platforms, and it generates plain old HTML that you can put on any static host. I played with several of the generators on the Jamstack list, and decided that this is the one I’m most comfortable recommending. It has a very high power-to-effort ratio, you can do some really useful stuff with very little knowledge. I’m using it on my personal site, https://nycki.net/, to automatically generate a “navbar” on every page, plus an RSS feed for my blog. It’s also nice for generating “prev/next” links under articles.

I think the biggest culture shock for a lot of people is “fewer surprises, more options.” On my machine at least, updates don’t run automatically – I might get a notification that “updates are available” but that’s it, I still have to say “okay, now is a good time to update”, it won’t surprise me with them.

Similarly, if I want to set a hotkey for like “take a screenshot of the current application”, I can do that! But the downside is that it might not be set up by default, I have to go to settings -> hotkeys or something similar.

Linux “gets out of your way” and lets you solve problems, but that also means it’s not always going to solve them for you. It’s getting better at this over time – if lots of people have the same problem, the solution might get merged “upstream”, but a lot of things are still “well, how do YOU want it to work?”.

is this available in text form?

this is my sticking point with fish. I still need to know bash for writing portable scripts, so its hard to justify scripting in fish.

I still use firefox despite their questionable leadership, for one major reason: it prevents Google from setting whatever web standards they want. Sites that aren’t standards compliant will usually still work in Chromium-based browsers, but they will break in Firefox, and then I can report the bugs.

Probably Emacs. /j

I didn’t see what c this was, and I was all set to say “Brother multifunction b/w laser printer”, along with some colored copy paper and a long stapler that can reach the middle of a page. Everything you need to make some bitchin zines.

I have Syncthing set up to copy save data between my pc and steam deck, but not just for emulator stuff: its got my entire modded minecraft directory and my balatro modloader nn there too.

wait how does your clipboard shortcut work op? that sounds nifty!

i use a joplin notebook. its like a private wiki, and it works on android too.