I would suspect something in /etc/profile or ~/.bash_profile, ~/.bash_login or  ~/.profile might be causing the wait. I'd start by putting echo "In .bash_profile" at the start of ~/.bash_profile (or ~/.bash_login or ~/.profile, whichever you have) and see if that comes out before or after the pause. If it's after the pause (or you don't have any of ~/.bash_profile, ~/.bash_login or  ~/.profile) then I would make a similar temporary change to /etc/profile to see if that's causing the pause. Then trace through the relevant script to find out what's causing the pause. Adding set -x to the script near the start could be helpful.

Keep notes of what you change so you can change it back when you have stopped investigating.

Try ssh -v devuan which should provide a lot of messages about the logon process. And look in /etc/ssh/sshd_config and /etc/ssh/sshd_config.d/ (grep -v '^#'  /etc/ssh/sshd_config to exclude comments should make it easier to see the relevant entries).

Post output from the commands here if you are still stuck.

Although I have had to resort to:
ps -ef | grep sshd
(assume that shows sshd is /usr/sbin/sshd.)
strings /usr/sbin/sshd | grep -i config

Just to be sure I was looking at the right config file. But that was working as a UNIX system admin when we had a wide range of OSes to look after.

I now seem to be back at "Can't upgrade from ascii because Nvidia have dropped support for running CUDA on my GPU". So I'll probably keep this system on ascii until the GPU dies. But at least I'm not short of disk space any more since the new disk is 1Tb and the old disk was 332Gb.

df -i show you the number of inodes in a filesystem. df --total show how many 1k blocks of disk space there are (in both cases you get total, used and available). See man df for details.

It's possible to run out of inodes but not space. This makes it impossible to add any new files to the filesystem. Which can be very confusing if you don't realise what's happened (I fell into this trap, though the disk was faulty and bought a new disk before realising I only needed to tidy up junk files).

Also you don't usually need to run df as root, it should work just as well as a non-root account.

The program that re-creates it probably deletes it before re-writing the latest contents into it. If you own .local/share/ then a program, running as you can delete files from it, even if you don't own them.

You might be able to stop this by making .local/share/ owned by root. But this would break anything else trying to create a file in .local/share/

I've not used doas (I learnt sudo before doas was available), but you will need to think hard about what you want to do. If you let people run an arbitrary command as root they could just run bash as root to get the same effect as doas -s.

With sudo it's possible to let people run a list of commands as root, but not a shell, as long as none of the commands you allow can spawn a shell. But it's easy to let a way to a root shell slip through.

Forcing people to jump through a few hoops to get to a root shell *might* have some value, but it's more likely to give you a false sense of security.

You should look at the cartoon in the April 2023 issue of Linux Magazine (Linux Pro Magazine in North America). It has an alternative meaning for the name.

Assuming the system where the mate components are missing is the one that had the HDD crash:

Check the config files in your home dir. And compare them with the systems that are OK. That sounds the most likely cause if the OS is identical.

And it seemed as clear as mud to me. You still havn't answered my questions:

What make and model of laptop do you have?
What make and model of TV would you like to connect it to?

Without that information we can't offer any specific advice.

Do you have a GUI installed? If so what one? I assume tty1 is the normal text only display.

Exactly what happens when you try to log on to tty7 with a long password? It sounds as if it *might* be the GUI only allows you to enter 20 (or so) characters for the password (the programmers probably assumed no one would want to use a 24 char password). Does trying to log on produce a failed login reported in syslog or by lastb? If not the GUI might not be allowing you to try to log on.

ctrl-alt-f1 (press all 3 keys at once) should get you to a text screen (there are 6 of them, ctrl-alt-f1 to ctrl-alt-f6). ctrl-alt-f7 should get you back to the GUI (try this out *before* you get another hang). If that works you should be able to log on and try commands like killall firefox and killall thunderbird.

If you can't free the GUI you could use sudo shutdown -r now as a slightly gentler way to force a reboot.

How badly failed is it?
Does the system show any sign of life when you try to boot it?
Does the display work if you try to boot off a live disk/USB stick? If not it might be a hardware fault.
Have you got another computer on the same network? If so does the faulty system respond to ping? Or come up far enough to SSH onto it?
Does ctrl-alt-f1 get you to a text screen?