I think it's the monolithic nature of it. I've been running Fedora LXDE lately, which worked fine for a while, but then I broke my own rule of never upgrading

I think it's the monolithic nature of it. I've been running Fedora LXDE lately, which worked fine for a while, but then I broke my own rule of never upgrading something that's already working. Now, I have the same issue you describe occasionally. My whole desktop freezes up, and I can't do anything. It seems to happen if I'm running my screencapture script and switch desktops at exactly the wrong time. However, the desktop is not the OS, and is isolated from it quite well. I can still press Ctrl+Alt+F2, switch to a completely different "environment", and start killing processes until I get the one which causes the issue. (Seems to be the `import` command.) On Windows, similar to Mac as well, there is no such separation. Everything is integrated into one big blob, and once that's broken, that's it. Maybe it's because it is all developed together as one thing, whereas in the gnuli world, the kernel is developed without assumptions of any particular thing running on top of it?