You literally replied to me twice.

The irony is that constant obsessions/hyperfocus is a symptom of ADHD.

Roughly 13% of the world is diagnosed with ADHD. Yes, there are plenty of people who should not get that diagnosed, and yes, plenty of people fall through the cracks when they get screened. However, I’ll assume those 2 groups are roughly equal and cancel out.

It is VERY clear that he has one of the many symptoms of ADHD. Yes, that symptom alone could be caused by several conditions, which is what I mentioned in my post. However, everyone in this thread who suggested it might be ADHD specified to get it checked out. They did NOT say that they definitively have ADHD. Nobody in this thread made a diagnosis. They told OP to see a doctor because of their concerns.

Here is what your argument boils down to:

1. If it’s a medical condition, you shouldn’t talk about it at all
2. Because there are far more people without ADHD than with, you should speak as if ADHD people basically don’t exist.

1 is a laughable argument because if this were a post about a physical condition, like a weird bump, it would definitely be acceptable to tell someone to go see a doctor.

2 is basically saying that language shouldn’t be inclusive of minority groups because minority groups “have to deal with reality.” That is an incredibly ignorant mindset to have, and if that’s how you think, I’m genuinely appalled.

If you yourself had ADHD or heavily researched the condition via doctor’s presentations or papers, you’d probably understand why people on the internet love to bring it up so much. The diagnostic criteria in some cases (for example, in the DSM-5) is god awful. Many doctors out there dismiss ADHD for stupid reasons like “it’s only for children!!” because they don’t understand it. There are too many doctors out there who only diagnose based on disproven stereotypes. The end result is a crap-ton of people who are screwed in life because they are ill-fitted to do the same stuff that the majority can do. Said people are screwed until they are 30 or 40 or 50 when they finally encounter a doctor that listens to them and considers something despite it being uncommon.

If you still think telling 800 billion people, “it’s reality,” is in any way productive and not harmful, I can’t help you.

It’s like telling a fish to climb a waterfall. All saying “just do it and move on” does is reinforce the idea that the other person isn’t good enough.

Try to do homework assignments at 6 PM get distracted realize it’s 11 PM and time to sleep stay up anyway to do it get distracted every 5 minutes get back on track each time because you’re incredibly stressed rake a nap because you’re sleepy and can’t think wake up at 6 AM realizing it’s the next day and you only finished half the assignment be late for the bus by 1 minute shamefully wake up parents to drive you or walk to school end up being 10 minutes late for class turn in your half-complete assignment, which you’ll probably get at most a 50 on sit through a bunch of uninteresting classes rarely be able to pay attention barely understand the material because of sleepiness go home repeat

That is only a slight exaggeration of undiagnosed ADHD. The most unrealistic parts are the length of the first distraction (should be 2 hours max) and the grades (probably around 70%). None of this comes from a lack of trying.

Here’s an analogy of how distractions happen. Say that you’re at home doing the dishes. 5 minutes later, you teleport about a mile away in a random direction. From then on, you teleport a mile in a random direction every 15 or so seconds. You eventually are teleported back to your house, where you can finally walk back to the kitchen and finish the dishes without teleporting for several minutes.

Usually, we think about a tangentially related topic over and over again until we’re so far off that we realize what we’re supposed to be doing. This is also one aspect of ADHD - it impacts so many miniscule things that add up to become giant problems.

If you don’t think ADHD is a serious concern, you should look up some statistics regarding it. ADHD people have significantly lower life expectancies on average. More seriously, they are 5x more likely to attempt suicide than people without it. Also, people with ADHD are really likely to have other conditions/disorders as well.

And that’s honestly not a positive. People out there don’t get diagnosed until their 30s because they never seriously considered it. Not saying OP has ADHD, but dismissing it outright without more exploration is potentially harmful.

To be clear, for people with ADHD, this is toxic advice that only causes harm. Can’t speak for anyone else.

Fair. It’s still intuitive as an XP/7/8 user, but not for a new user. That being said, Windows 11 has made good improvements in moving stuff to the “Settings” app.

You’re only partially correct. I did grow up using Windows, but I also dual-booted Ubuntu on every machine that I could. I also used a Macbook exclusively for a few years, and MacOS was way closer to Linux than Windows was back then.

Nowadays, I also use a mix of Powershell and Ubuntu via WSL, depending on what I need. Linux commands usually do less than what I’d like it to, but they work like simple building blocks. Powershell does exactly what I want, but some of these commands are way too freaking long.

However, I’d argue that path variables aren’t for power users. Sure, it’s not for your grandmother, but a decent chunk of people who wanted to run a Minecraft server for their friends probably looked into path variables, and almost all of them looked at firewall settings and port forwarding. Those people will be confused and scared of GUIs and editing txt or bat files. Without a friend walking them through the process, opening a terminal is infinitely more intimidating. Even if someone is fine with learning terminal commands, there aren’t nearly enough checks with Linux commands when doing something potentially destructive compared to Windows. With Windows, you usually get some minor annoyance with hard to find solutions at worst. With Linux, assuming no backups, you’ll end up needing to clean install if you’re trying to learn how to do something.

In all fairness, I haven’t used Linux GUIs often in about 4 years. The most recent time I used one at all was about a year ago when I was trying to set up a remote desktop solution, but didn’t know what a desktop manager was, what a display server was etc. I only really use Linux from a terminal nowadays.

EDIT: To add to the PATH thing, you severely overestimate the number of programmers who are also power users. It is crazy how many CS majors don’t know how to fix basic issues.

I won’t give you the “self-discipline” options since others touched on it. If it’s a mental thing, it could be ADHD, anxiety, and/or depression. Before you dismiss it, look at the diagnostic criteria from doctors on YouTube or maybe the ICD. I wouldn’t put too much weight into the DSM-5 for ADHD because it’s been criticized for having an inaccurate or stereotypical view of it. People like Dr. K (HealthyGamer) say that ADHD is simultaneously overdiagnosed and underdiagnosed for similar reasons. If you do go the psychiatry route, make sure you find a doctor who genuinely listens. Medication and therapy can change your life for the better, but they won’t do that if the person giving the treatment doesn’t care.

Being intuitive.

On Windows, features are often a few clicks away from being enabled or modified. Software that you download also does most of the heavy lifting when it comes to changing your settings to what the program needs.

On the Linux distros that I’ve used, way too much setup is required via copying and pasting commands into the terminal. There were times when I completely replaced my path variables instead of appending to them, and that is way harder to do on Windows than Linux. Mistakes like that often lead me to installing a distro 3 times when doing a project, whereas Windows 11 rarely has those issues.

Hard drives don’t last 20 years, and even then, there can be an unforeseen event that can render those drives inoperable. Preserving the original site would just be another form of redundancy.