

I switched from Adderall to Ritalin recently and its been interesting. Also in the possible AuDHD camp, but ive never had vyvanse.
Generally speaking, Ritalin has been better at clearing out the “background noise” but not as good at the motivating to do a task. Tbh, I’m OK with that because I often found myself hyperfixating on the wrong things on Adderall. Worth noting that I’m also on am SNRI (venlafaxine) for anxiety/depression and migraines, so that likely has some bearing on how each works for me. It wasn’t as drastic a change as I thought it’d be tbh. Just different. I hesitated trying it out for a while but I was ovrrthinking it. At least for now I think Ritalin is better for me, but I don’t think Adderall is out of the question in the future.
While I never found coffee and adderall throughout the day to be that weird, i did need to watch it or I’d be jittery. I don’t think I’ve ever felt like I overdid it with coffee and Ritalin. I’m a coffee fiend so that’s been a positive for me.
I also have felt like adderall may have been masking how depressed I was for a while. I often felt like it’d just nuke the things that were bothering me until it wore off. Ritalin doesn’t seem to do that. Don’t get me wrong, that’s a good thing since its forced me to actually internalize and start processing it while Adderall may have been kicking the can down the road more than I thought, and it is known more for the emotional changes than Ritalin is. I suspect this also has something to do with the alexythymia component of ASD, which adds some points to the notion Ritalin may be better for AuDHD.
Fwiw I was avoidant of arch for a long time and took the deep dive a few years back. I’ve really not had to do any more debugging work than I have to with Debian (which I’m also a fan of and use).
EndeavourOS helps a lot with smoothing over the possible gotchas and my machines with it tend to run steam games (proton or native) out of the box the majority of the time.