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?

If your problem is that the system runs slowly then start by trying to fix that *without* disabling FDE.

A few questions to start with:
What sort of system is it? (Desktop or Laptop, make model, etc?)
What CPU has it got?
How much memory has it?
What is it's display? (Could you add a GPU if it hasn't got one?)
What is running on it? (OS, desktop env, etc?)
Is it using swap space very often? (If yes then adding memory might speed it up a lot.)

Try running top and vmstat to see if they say anything interesting.

Hopefully answering that lot will point you towards a fix.

I assume both screens will be powered on before the boot. But how are they connected (are there two motherboard sockets or is one on a GPU)? And what sort of PC is it?

There *should* be a BIOS option to say which screen to use. But that probably only applies to the BIOS output.

You could try booting the system with one screen powered off and see what happens. Then try the other. (It probably won't help but costs nothing to experiment.)

The first thing I'd try is to repeat round 1, cp sums.txt sums_1.txt, repeat round 2 and diff sums_1.txt sums.txt to see if they differ.

Don't blindly assume everyone on the left is virtuous. That would place you in grave danger if you encounter a psychopathic murderer who claims to be on the left to give people a false sense of security. And a con artist doing the same thing could give you a painful lesson.

In any case trying to fit all political views onto one dimension is far to simplistic. The extreme left and extreme right are almost identical in what they actually do, the centre are much further from them than they are from each other. Remember that Nazi is short for National Socialist.