Can you clarify the certifying body you're referring to when you say "certified organic"? My comment only pertains to the USDA Organic program, as that is the subject of the original post, and I linked the regulations which govern that program. Most of those regulations are not related to pesticide use and its residual levels.

The bigger problem when running Arch is that there's a very high gap between "the bootloader makes the kernel run" and "functional desktop system". The installation guide will get you to the first one. For someone who's used to Windows, even as an IT pro, learning Arch is a firehose that's hard to drink from.

Once you've pacstrap'd and set up a user you reboot and start your new OS. Except you have no internet because you didn't know you had to install dhcpcd. Fine, install that--except your user isn't in sudoers, so you have to figure out how to get back to being root to edit the sudoers file. With visudo. Ten minutes later you've figured out how to find and edit the right line. Another ten to get out of vi. Then once that's sorted you're sitting at a terminal you don't know any commands for with no idea how to get to a graphical environment.

You look on your phone and find a recommendation for XFCE4 as a lightweight and simple DE. Great, install that. Try to launch it, and...a bunch of arcane errors. Another hour of troubleshooting and you learn that you missed xorg, which for some reason isn't a dependency of XFCE4. O...kay. You don't want to have to launch it every time you boot, so you go digging and find out you need a desktop manager. Takes some time, but you finally install one and enable the service in systemd, which you have to do manually for some reason.

Finally you get to a graphical environment, and...the fonts are all weird, and unicode symbols are just placeholders. Wait, fonts. You have to install fonts. More research, but you get there. Finally you launch a browser and are delighted to find something familiar. It all works the same. Great! Let's watch a video to make sure playback is working, and...no sound.

Okay, more research, and turns out you missed pulseaudio. Install that, start the daemon aaaand...no audio. Fine, how do you check the audio level? Ah, there's an XFCE4 plugin for pulseaudio. Find that, install it, put it on your panel, click it and...pavucontrol isn't installed. Whatever that is. Okay, install it and try again. Great! So, for some reason the default audio level when you install is 0. Turn that up and you finally hear sound! Hours after starting the process.

And every. little. thing. is like that. For weeks. Especially with Nvidia, and especially if you make the mistake of following a recent guide that shunts you into a Wayland environment. Every time you need to do something there are 20 options, five of which are well-documented but deprecated, the first three you try don't work for reasons you don't understand, then you finally find something that works well enough. Rinse, repeat, for every little thing.

And this is coming from a complete Arch stan. I love Arch. It's my only distro these days. I'm on Hyprland, my neovim is tricked out, everything is slick, responsive, just takes a couple keystrokes to accomplish anything I want to do, and I have everything set up exactly how I want it. It took a long time to get there, though, and I've been using Linux off and on for over 20 years, maining it for the last 10.

Screen sharing is fine, handled by Pipewire. OBS is adding (has added?) streaming through Pipewire too. And I've had no issues getting screenshots using grim, which isn't tied to a specific compositor. Not everything is copacetic, but the things you're talking about are mostly non-issues these days.

Great name, btw

Fair enough. I used XFCE for 15 years and decided to give Hyprland a go. Still some rough edges, and some shockingly basic things are still being figured out (should multiple windows from the same process be able to set different icons, and windows being able to set--or even hint--where they want to go), but overall I've had basically zero issues, and I'm enjoying it enough that I made the change permanent. Screen share and streaming work fine. I wouldn't call the overall functionality mature, but it's perfectly workable. Unless, you know...Nvidia. I've heard it's gotten a bit better lately, but I wouldn't have switched if I hadn't gone AMD for my new GPU.

Yep, using Pipewire.

Other things helped--like drinking half a liter of water before going to bed so biology forces the issue--but the sunrise light was the key for me too. I set it to fade in over 10 minutes, ending 10 minutes before my alarm goes off. I used to set alarms in three minute increments and still take an hour to get up. Now I'm usually up with the first alarm, and much more alert.

Sensory processing disorder associated with autism is exactly what came to my mind because it's exactly what I deal with. I usually shut down instead of melting down, but kids playing at anything past a barely-audible level is extremely difficult for me. Other attention-grabbing noises are also difficult, like dogs barking, car doors closing, people yelling, etc., and other stimuli cause me to shut down too, like dogs jumping/breathing on me (basically everything about dogs, unfortunately) or someone touching the back of my head/neck.

It took a lot of research into how my sensory processing reacts to different things, and I still struggle frequently, but I'm a father now and most days I'm very happy about it. I have noise canceling headphones for when I get overwhelmed, and I keep a clicky mechanical keyboard switch and barrette in my pocket to fiddle with, which helps a lot.

OP, I can obviously only speak from my own experiences, but I think dissecting what exactly causes these sudden emotional bursts and finding sensory distraction or blocking techniques to dampen them might work for you too. Headphones are a godsend.

Edit: Definitely seek a professional opinion (if possible for you) and look into misophonia, especially if specific sounds are your only issue. I just wanted to provide my perspective because for me the exact same issue the original post describes was part of a broader thing that needed addressing.

I've never had any issues on Hyprland. The Steam Deck also uses Wayland (Gamescope). Not saying there can't be cases where unique bugs happen on Wayland, and maybe there's something else I don't know about, but Steam Wayland support seems to be fine as far as I can tell.

A couple days ago I tried Hyprland just to see what it was like. I've been on XFCE for over a decade and expected to play with Hyprland for a couple hours, go "Huh, that's cool", and uninstall it, but I think the switch may be permanent. It's fantastic

I used to be omniaural too, so I get where you're coming from, but have you seen the whistleblower videos from the airpod factory? Sick.

Thanks for taking the time to respond, even though I was critical! Sure, I have no disagreement with anything you said in your reply. I'm also involved in hobbies where bad information can hurt people (including canning and foraging for mushrooms), and I'm obviously against knowledgeable people being removed from positions of authority in these communities. This post bolds the text about being worried that new mods may miss something that the old mods wouldn't, which could lead to someone getting hurt. I saw that, and that a couple of early comments latched onto it as a focus. I had broccoli in a wok that I needed to get back to and just fired off a quick comment as a bit of infernal advocacy that the replacement of mod powers probably isn't as dire as the quote makes it sound.

All the time. I've worn the same style of clothing (all the same color, same style of pants, variable T-shirt to avoid questions about if I've done laundry, specific overshirt) and have kept the same hair/facial hair for most of my life. I've thought about wearing another color, but someone would say something and I know I'd get flustered or withdrawn, which would draw more attention.

Social lunches are the worst, especially business lunches. I hate eating in front of other people, but have to force myself to or they'll ask me why I'm not eating. Then I think am I eating too much and not engaging with the other people? Do they want me to be doing that or are they going to ask me why I'm being so quiet? Do they expect me to comment on the food? Now that I'm thinking about what I'm doing have I started chewing weird? Eventually I'm just looking around like a cornered chipmunk between twitchy nibbles of food, which...doesn't help. Thankfully my friends all know my discomforts by now, so they don't care if I scarf food in another room and come back, and the pandemic made business lunches stop for the most part.