This is one of my favorite videos for showing this in effect: https://youtu.be/o9BqrSAHbTc

So were actually supposed to give attention to the most basic day to day chores?

Believe it or not, yes. It can be massively beneficial to teach yourself to give more true attention to all things. The more we’re in our heads, the less likely we are to be in touch with reality. Thought can only take you so far and there’s no downside to being more alert in our daily lives.

Obviously, if your job is to be a theoretical mathematician, this doesn’t apply in the same way, but mindfulness is a very real thing that benefits all parts of life.

Edit: I’m not even kidding when I say this is both the core principle of what Alan Watts was teaching (here’s a clip from his famous “Overthinker” speech) and the moral behind the movie Click. They’re both saying the same thing in different ways.

What you’re describing is the opposite of mindfulness and is a great way to entirely lose yourself.

Sure autopilot has its uses, but if you’re relying on autopilot day in and day out as so many people are now doing in modern day, you are no longer yourself. You have become your autopilot. Like a gentle brainwash.

If you do this for long enough, this is how you end up with a mid-life crisis, because you’ll go through decades of your life on autopilot when one day your actual self shows up to take an assessment.

That’s when you realize that all the decisions, desires, pitfalls and relationships you’ve been having were also your autopilot and not you. If you’re not legitimately assessing your life and reflecting on it on a regular basis and constantly giving your life “input,” the world will leave you behind.

To your first edit, having been a user since 2010, I’ve tried it both ways and sometimes just giving in to a new distribution is easier than spending a week or more combing forums and getting ghosted while your display resolution is broken.

When it comes down to it, unless you’re using Linux as a hobby, I say distro hop away until something clicks in your first few months. When you finally get your hooks into one you feel you understand, that’s when you start putting the effort into perfecting it.

Not retro, but Instruments of Destruction is made by one of the Red Faction devs. Also check out Abriss.

Both are machine building games with a focus on destruction. Instruments of Destruction does have a ton of prebuilt vehicles though if building isn’t your thing. The he campaign is also pretty easy to plow through to unlock the prebuilts.

Well there’s your problem. But really, it’s because long-time distro hoppers will finally find the one that meets all their needs and assume it meets everyone else’s needs as well.

About the only thing other than Mint that I recommend to beginners is Endeavor or Bazzite if they need gaming. And even then, is lean toward Endeavor first just because it’s less modified and they’ll get more consistent results during troubleshooting.

But yeah, new users really don’t need anything other than the bare minimum otherwise they’re likely to get turned off pretty quickly by documentation not lining up to their distros edits.