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Ubuntu is fine. Drivers are annoying on all distros (nvidia updates for me mainly, I don’t update hardware often).
I have daily driven various distros and tested a lot since the 90s and I pay close attention to time spent on customizing and fixes, and ubuntu just isn’t worse than other distros. I make setup scripts and have custom dockerfiles for webtops.
I want to like nixos or whatever fork will prevail, but it’s more work than people want to admit. I personally don’t want to have to pay that much attention to my operating system. It’s why i ditched gentoo almost 20 years ago. I don’t want to lurk forums for fixes and tweaks. I also make sure hardware I buy doesn’t have glaring compatibility issues.
If Ubuntu rubs you the wrong way but you are fine with most of it, just use debian.
If you google “skr mini e3 v2 pinout” you can find 5v and ground pins. The question is how much load is already on it’s 5v regulator and how much are you adding.
You can power the pi from a buck converter or from whatever else.
They apparently make an addon 5v buck converter for that board.
Using a multimeter could help avoid frying more stuff.
In a driver, there’s a lot more than just C and hardware interaction. You also have to deal with:
Concurrency and Synchronization – Managing locks, spinlocks, atomic operations, and ensuring safe access to shared resources.
Memory Management – Allocating kernel memory safely, handling DMA buffers, and avoiding memory leaks or invalid accesses.
Interrupt Handling – Dealing with IRQs, deferring work using tasklets, workqueues, or bottom halves.
State Management – Handling suspend, resume, and power states efficiently.
Error Handling and Recovery – Ensuring robustness in the presence of hardware failures or unexpected states.
Device Trees and ACPI – Parsing platform configuration data.
Firmware Communication – Loading and interfacing with device firmware blobs.
Kernel APIs and Subsystems – Interacting with networking, block devices, input devices, and other kernel frameworks.
Performance Optimizations – Managing cache coherency, NUMA awareness, and latency-sensitive operations.
Security Considerations – Preventing privilege escalation, ensuring safe user-space interaction, and sandboxing where applicable.
Yes, interfacing with hardware often requires unsafe Rust or C, but a lot of driver logic isn’t directly interacting with raw hardware registers. Rust can help improve safety in many of these areas by reducing common C pitfalls like use-after-free, null dereferences, and buffer overflows.