Do you have a mental illness that changes the way you use technology or computers, Jow Forums?

Do you have a mental illness that changes the way you use technology or computers, Jow Forums?

For me, I have some sort of obsessive-compulsive thing with computers. I'm on my 40th(?) or something Windows install this year. I'll do a "reset" every time I see something that contaminates my "pure" setup. I'll uninstall all programs and try to restore things to their default state, then I run a cleaner on my whole OS wiping all free space with 3 passes. Before finally cutting off the "impure" installation/setup, I reset my display to factory defaults. Then I reflash the BIOS, boot up my SSD erasure tool and run that 12 times (multiples of 3 are better then other numbers for some reason), then I reflash my BIOS after completing the erase. I reinstall my OS, then reformat my USB drives I need for the erasure tool and BIOS flashing, sometimes I'll run a 3 pass full wipe on them afterwards. I used to be able to use the next Windows installation as a pure setup, but nowadays I repeat the previous process 6 times before I can really use my PC. My SSD is approaching 100TB written and it will probably die this year.

The standards for purity keep growing higher and higher. Reinstalling and stuff doesn't work as well now. My computer might be fundamentally contaminated because the hardware at some point in the past had to parse the information making up the impurities that I cannot cope with existing on my PC - my display, while reset so many times, at one point displayed an arrangement of pixels making up impure information. Same thing with my GPU or CPU. Maybe purity doesn't really exist. Purity doesn't feel as pure as it used to, it's a fading feeling and not a reward for following all of these ridiculous and wasteful procedures like it used to be. Normally Jow Forums has a high-risk contamination factor, but I'm cleaning up after an impure setup so I can post here for now. I have no mouth and I must scream.

Attached: what-the-fuck-am-i-reading.gif (446x469, 1.46M)

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See a therapist

>The standards for purity keep growing higher and higher.
And yet you still use Windows.

It's because Samsung Magician only supports Windows. When I'm finally done setting everything up, I used TAILS pretty much exclusively.

I have many mental illnesses that conglomerate together to form a very weird technical experience. The worst of them is schizoaffective, ADHD, and OCD, all of them are diagnosed with the exception of my suspected unironic autism
>Can not sleep without an internet connection, even if I'm not using it before/while falling asleep
>Slowly weaning myself off of not being able to sleep without watching one of two specific YouTubers (vinny and Joel if you care)
>Can not do work on specific computers/settings, if I do something non work related things in a work setting/computer, I will never be able to do work there again without outside reinforcement
>Certain things online speak to me telepathically, no it's not real, but it's such an enjoyable experience most of the time that I dont try to stop it and rather reinforce it, mostly happens during videos or audio
>If I am away from one of my 5 internet connected devices for too long, as soon as I get near it again, I have no self control but to spend the next few days with it with minimal sleep
>The only time I have less than 5 tabs open is when I have restarted my computer and the restore tabs option hasnt popped up but it only lasts for a few moments as the days curiosity pours out over my search bar

Antidepressants may help.
And see a doctor.
Good luck.

>that first boot up and session after preparing and reinstalling for 2 days
you cant beat it, 'this is the last time' you say, but saying that seems to set the installation standards higher, with more chance that it wont install 'just right' and the magic will wear off sooner than usual..

You should use incognito mode, all disk cache is disabled but only on chrome/chromium, firefox will still write to %temp% folders for media cache
If you do this the only lasting damage will be to the cryptneturlcache folder (ssl server cache) but it is minimal

I am the same, got diagnosed with OCD and I'm on meds, helps a little bit.

good thread

what meds can i ask? i am on seroquel but all it does is help with sleep (done all the tricyclic and ssri)

Have you tried Gentoo?

fluxiotin 60 ug, the trick with ocd is high dosage. It's an SSRI

I'm a bit less autistic but hopping between linux distros and windows
sometimes I get really annoyed that I'm running something inferior and limiting myself by using free software, and seeing computers at my uni and other people (supposedly professionals like carmack and shit) running windows and visual studio, I think "but everyone runs windows. it has a few problems but it runs great on the majority of the 800 million devices it's installed on and that's impressive". after a few days (has happened only after a few hours before) I go "but I'm tied to paid, closed-source software even though I'm broke in a third world country; I don't have as much choice for customization; several UI and usability inconsistencies; NTFS is inferior" and hop back to a linux distro. sometimes I only hop between different distros, and that's less bad because I keep my home partition so I don't need to re-download everything from gdrive
I'm aware I am kind of ill and it just bothers me so much, like I see people running the same system for years, even old versions because of 'stability' and they're familiar with it, and I just can't settle down on something and actually do something productive

> SSD
Ya dun goofed. When NAND cells wear out, they keep information forever, controller marks them as "faulty" and takes some blocks from reserved space.

>I reinstall my OS, then reformat my USB drives I need for the erasure tool and BIOS flashing, sometimes I'll run a 3 pass full wipe on them afterwards.
>I used to be able to use the next Windows installation as a pure setup, but nowadays I repeat the previous process 6 times before I can really use my PC

This has to be bait

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imo the important thing is that you use what is most comfortable to you, eg what you feel more at home with, the feeling that one is inferior to the other will be a non issue then

good luck to you then, it did fuck all for me but my willpower sucks (10 years down the line they cut the therapy off) but i guess not everyone is the same

read this
gnu.org/proprietary/malware-microsoft.en.html

And stop this useless struggle. You'll feel much better afterwards

Whenever I use a computer I have this inherent niggle where I want to kill myself.
Either I have depression or I am just simply getting PTSD flashbacks of why I loathe computers and technology.

I loathe it so much I shitpost on technology forums to ease my pain.

It's just autism. Some of us are like this. Just accept it and move on.

Or masochism.

>Certain things online speak to me telepathically... mostly happens during videos or audio
That's called hearing, user

I'm very comfortable at linux, specially openSUSE. while I last like a day or a week maximum on windows, I can last several weeks if not months on this distro. I just get the feeling sometimes I should be more professional-y, "do what everyone does" or when I struggle to do something in libreoffice/onlyoffice and miss MS office, and end up installing windows again. between distros is usually when something breaks or I think something is better at some other distro, but end. up coming back every time
and thanks, I feel less anxious and "doing the right thing" now. I'll try settling down

I fucking love neckbeard tier balls deep autism, I'd unironically enjoy using purely free software without a display server if it was feasible to work like this, but I'm also extremely lazy and have almost no willpower. So as a result I have a mish-mash of half-working setups, absolutely filled with "yeah this needs to be configured better - I'll get around to it" type of stuff, while I continue with whatever hacks or manual workarounds I came up one day and have been using since then, for months and years on end.
Some examples: to lock my computer, I use a dodgy shell script I threw together one evening. I haven't tied it to ACPI yet, nor have gotten around to trying a display/login manager or whatever they're called. The volume buttons on my laptop don't work: I have alsamixer permanently open in one workspace. Changing my screen brightness also doesn't work with the keyboard, there's another questionable shell script I invoke with dmenu, I don't even remember how it works at all. xrandr maybe? I use vim, but I don't know the vast majority of useful stuff: I basically spam w, b, j and k to navigate, then use d/D, c/C or i/a as appropriate. I looked up stuff like marks once, but I forgot how to use them. I have emacs installed and the start of an evil configuration but it's been so long that I forgot everything about elisp and everything related.
On my desktop I installed Gentoo; figured out how to make it work with full disk LUKS; recompiled and bootstrapped the entire toolchain; debloated my kernel; ended up with a fully working system. I have not used it since, because it also has Windows 10 installed. Why does it have Windows 10 installed? Because after I built it I decided to install gentoo, then didn't touch it for 8 months and used a shitty laptop instead. Then I caved and installed Windows. Not before physically pulling out my mobo's battery because I had set a BIOS password that survived a CMOS reset.
I could go on.

"more professionally"
"use Windows"
While some professionals use windows, a disproportionate amount of Linux users are professionals. Especially in academia, in my university CentOS is on every department machine and most professors I've seen either also use Linux on their personal machines, or have macs.
Plus the overwhelming majority of the world's infrastructure is based on Linux. Any work involving servers, backends, cloud infrastructure, HPC, etc. and you're more than likely gonna be dealing with Linux.
I'll tell you the two main reasons people use Windows for development professionally: either they're targeting specifically Windows customers and prefer to build natively, or they never used anything else and can't be bothered to learn a new OS.

>LibreOffice
Literally stop using office software and use LaTeX (or another meme typesetting program, but latex is by far the most popular and therefore the one with the most support, tutorials, help, existing packages, etc.). It makes Word and Powerpoint obsolete. I have never used Excel; there are plenty of free software spreadsheets, including even emacs org-mode, but I have no idea how they stack up if you were a really in-depth Excel power user; but this is pretty much the only thing I can think of.

Why do you hate computers and tech user?

>"more professionally"
>"use Windows"
>While some professionals use windows, a disproportionate amount of Linux users are professionals
yea, I know. by "professionals" I mean people working with either programming or content creation of any kind like music, drawing and shit, and 99,9% of them use windows. bothers me a little, like I'm not in the right track. I do know most people use it because they're familiar with it and don't want to learn something else, and I also know some things work better (or at all) on windows, but I don't create music or anything like that, so for programming linux is actually better
>Literally stop using office software and use LaTeX
I would if was something like writing an essay or a book, but I mainly deal with spreadsheets at work, and everyone uses Microsoft Excel. I tried using LO's Writer yesterday to write a simple assignment but didn't quite work out (it did work, but not like I imagined it because I couldn't format it properly. my fault that I didn't take my time to google stuff I didn't find by myself though). I guess I'll learn latex (or something else) this evening to re-do the assignment properly

It works different for everyone, I do indeed have high willpower (but also high anixety) Good luck, where there is hope there is way

>Certain things online speak to me telepathically, no it's not real, but it's such an enjoyable experience most of the time that I dont try to stop it and rather reinforce it, mostly happens during videos or audio

what you hear?

>people working with [...] content creation of any kind like music, drawing and shit
This of all things is a retarded argument. Do you create content/art/music? You already said you don't, so. People who work in rough environments use a panasonic toughbook, people who are PR representatives will care more about how businesslike and sleek their laptop looks than its functionality. That doesn't mean you should do either. People who work on construction sites often use tractors, you don't need to buy a tractor. You know? The right tool for the job.
That's not to mention that most of these content creators are depending on patreon type donations and in no way have a sustainable career.

I'm fairly certain Dreamworks or something actually uses Linux based workstations for its animators, btw.

>I would if was something like writing an essay or a book, but I mainly deal with spreadsheets at work, and everyone uses Microsoft Excel.
Ouch. Especially if everyone else uses it, you're probably gonna have a bad time using something which isn't perfectly compatible in every way. But on the other hand since this is purely for work then don't let it influence your personal computer usage: leave Excel at work, don't install word on your own pc just for that.
Have fun learning Latex: use TexStudio or something to avoid having to set up your environment and just learn the commands in peace.

>This of all things is a retarded argument
I realize that, I'm sorry. it's kind of a irrational annoyed state that I'm somehow doing something wrong. working on trying to ignore and think "no, for what I do (surprisingly even the only game I play runs better on wine), linux is better _for me_"
>I'm fairly certain Dreamworks or something actually uses Linux based workstations for its animators, btw.
I've heard that before. actually even at Microsoft it seems a ton of servers and services run on linux
>leave Excel at work, don't install word on your own pc just for that.
since they're braindead-simple stuff most of the time, OnlyOffice's spreadsheet software is very close in compatibility. files created with its version of Word, however, get pretty broken when opened at MS Word or google docs. had to print it to a pdf once.
>Have fun learning Latex: use TexStudio or something to avoid having to set up your environment and just learn the commands in peace.
I've heard pretty good things about Latex, but also some bad things like it being too bloated. I generaly don't fall for the bloat meme like using window managers only and shit, but I recall some packages being haskell-tier large, being very slow and that there are alternatives much simpler. might be a meme. gotta check this all out later

This what you have is pretty much germophobia oriented towards computers. You want everything to be extremely neat, extremely clean. Everything has to be shiny and perfect, elsewise it may all fall down and crumble.

What happens if you don't do it? Have you tried it? Even more, do you understand how computers work? How pixels are displayed on the screen and how the machine reads and writes data? What happens on the very bit and byte level? Perhaps understanding it may help you acknowledge that the virtual world is not prone to impurity as our material world. You're treating the virtual as the real.

Yes there are fragments of data lying around, but this is like entropy. You can't abide your room for too long without having to organize it again because our necessities provoke entropy over our surroundings. It is the same when using your computer, and I'm sure you know it. However, reformatting a device twice, thrice or even more doesn't do much. What reformatting does is setting every byte not used in the system to 00000000, and you won't reach obscure corners of your machine by doing it over and over again.

Your compulsion is acting like an addiction, and like an addiction it will hurt if you try to transcend it, but that is no reason for not trying. How do you feel by know this? How would you feel if you didn't act on this obsessive need for purity?

Not much. I have an obsessive compulsive personality but it doesn't bleed to much in how I use my computer. I just don't have much patience for when Linux breaks and I often do a fresh install if I can't solve the problem in more than 3 hours. I'm gonna have to do it again soon because I fucking broke everything using Disco Dingo beta.

Usually I just obsess with my GTD system. I oscillate between Evernote + Trello and Emacs Orgmode. I'm always switching from one to the other because both setups have qualities I adore and limitations that irritate me, and usually they're complementarily opposites. That is, a function trello has Emacs lacks, and a function Emacs has trello lacks. I know I can use these apps from within Emacs, but the implementations are hacky and buggy and I don't like to spend a lot of time troubleshooting programs instead of using them.

LaTeX is bloated but, as someone who does in fact fall for the minimalism meme for DEs and stuff (dwm here), I can say that it's one of those things where the bloat is, if not necessary, at least extremely helpful. The simpler alternatives are great, but they almost always produce worse-looking typesetting. I think lout uses in theory the same typesetting algorithm, but still does worse in some cases. And the packages of LaTeX are really helpful: pretty much anything you want to draw or show, can be done with only a few commands using the right package.
Only real criticism of latex is that the default TeX install includes maybe a few too many packages by default. It has a decent package manager and a great repo, so it could probably do with not packaging so much on a default install. But disk space nowadays is cheap enough that it's not one of those things that I worry about.
Also, the output is gonna be a static document anyway, so bloat in the typesetting doesn't actually matter at all. LaTeX only runs when you actually compile your document, so RAM usage or whatever doesn't matter either. Much unlike, say, your window manager, which is gonna be running pretty much always when you're using your computer. The only thing that matters is disk space, and again I don't see it as a concern.

i have schizoaffective disorder and i got a bit more paranoid about malware and data collection. nothing too bad really, i still use windows and browse without a vpn or tor.

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Do you think I'm going to read all this?

I see. so no worries then. I'll focus on latex that probably has better support and documentation, since neither disk space or bloatedness (whatever that may be) bothers me too much. although I'll check out the other options too just in case

I have schizophrenia, I no longer have cable TV which is good and bad, but I miss having TV on in the background, sometimes I'll select a movie based on lines I may have heard someone say during the day or something that made me think of a particular movie. I'll also down convert movies so they can play on ever seemingly trivial devices in the background. I convert some to ~240p avi to play on a Pentium II through a 13" crt TV. The most recent development has been to convert them to play on a Ruizu/AGP tek mp3 player at 160x128 and then hook up the audio output to a FM radio transmitter to then play though my clock radio. Having the TV on in the background sometimes improves my thinking or the events of the movie/TV will sync up in a way that I like to what my main focus is on. Because my mind makes up little delusions about trivial things the TV in the background sort drowns out the underlying chatter and replaces it with an easily predictable pattern.

Enjoying purity. This is not some sort of character flaw. You need to become a politician or a geneticist and put this to good use.

I'm very obsessed with organization. All my files (probably around 3000) are manually named with snake_case, folders organized and perfectly named, much more but it's basically a digital extension of my extreme cleanliness (got rid of most I own so I have less upkeep), dunno if it's illness