You can do whatever you want. Practices and habits vary. But if you want unique, meaningful file names, you must change your naming convention.
Some people like to use the file name number the camera generated as part of the new file name, out of convenience or because it has a special attachment to them. In the final analysis however it is a meaningless number. It just just a number. Use the camera enough, and it will repeat again and again, meaning you have multiple source files named (for example) “DSC1213.ARW”, when means you will have multiple files named “xxxx-1213.ARW” etc. I suppose it works good enough for some people, and more power to them. It’s up to them. However, I find it inelegant and unnecessary.
Ultimately, as I tried to explain above, you have two reasonable choices:
- solely date time based
- date time + sequence number
You can go with (1) if you want to gamble that now and in the future, your photos will include subsecond metadata that a tool like exiv2 can understand. Personally I think this is risky because it is not an EXIF standard and consequently support for it varies widely. It cannot be relied on. It is not the fault of the exiv2 or ExifTool developers. It is the fault of the camera manufacturers.
So that leaves (2). Personally I have been using sequence numbers since 2007, when I first wrote Rapid Photo Downloader. They work. When used with date time, they make locating a unique file super quick and easy.
However, as I stated above, using sequence numbers could cause problems if the camera writes files to the memory card out of sequence, i.e. newer files are written before older files. That is, a file A taken earlier than file B has a file modification time that is later. Not good.
Your camera is relatively not new, so any modern distro should work just fine. However I still recommend against using a distro older than 2020. I have seen too many problems with older distros, causing exiv2 to crash, which causes Rapid Photo Downloader to crash in turn.