- Does your board support UEFI? Have you flashed it, if necessary? If not, your only option is board-specific image with board-specific U-Boot. Still, you may have some luck with mainline kernel after you flash that image.
- Assuming you've flashed UEFI and know how to work with it, you should IMO install mainline images whenever possible, as those will always have the Linux kernel with latest security patches (you shouldn't use LTS kernel before you've verified the very latest kernel version, unless your board is like 10 years old)
- However, mainline Linux is often missing certain features on certain boards. In that case, you may have to either load some dtb/.dtbo files (it's a way to specify hardware information at boot time), or, worst case, compile your own kernel with certain patches pulled from developers working on mainlining your board
- If you don't want to deal with all that, you can use premade images for your board. They will typically have an old kernel, but nonetheless it should Just Work™. You may still have to pick some .dtbs manually if your hardware is configurable enough (e.g. BPI-R3 has SD/EMMC switch, you can't use both at the same time, and you have to pick the specific .dtb file depending on what you use)
chayleaf
Discord isn't encrypted at all
it's good, but older software doesn't support it
executable ownership doesn't matter, what matters is the rights of the user running the binary, and whatever sandboxing you have configured. So use Flatpak or Firejail.
it's fine, but I recommend only enabling autologin at boot so you can lock the screen without shutting down the entire PC
Input/output error means the drive is just dying, irrespective of the software. Software can't do anything about failing hardware, and that's what you ran into.
it's the same as about:config
ssh keys go into my keepass db, keepassxc imports them into gpg agent or ssh agent. Bash aliases and so on are in my dotfiles
for example, when you need to copy some files and not the other, you can take your time selecting the specific files you need to copy instead of writing the list of files in one command. When you want to check the contents of a lot of files, you can just open file preview. Etc, basically sometimes CLI isn't as convenient as TUI/GUI
why does it have to be good or bad? it's just a fact you have to put up with
You can use Termux... but yeah, it's a little rough
And in all my 7 years of flashing phones I've never bricked one, though of course YMMV
Here's my example (Github mirror). It stores everything from my custom packages (like GIMP 2.99, which isn't yet packaged in nixpkgs, or a custom virtiofsd to workaround an upstream bug caused by switching from the old C to the new Rust implementation), to my fish, sway, rofi, mpv configs, to my entire server setup, including Gitea, Nextcloud, Keycloak, Mumble, mailserver and Matrix server with some bots and bridges (I recently migrated from an x86_64 to a arm64 board and the only post-install setup I had to do was copy /var), to my router's nftables rules.