Interestingly this has started happening on my mac, as of a few years ago. Obviously unrelated to Linux.

This is better viewed as a sequencing thing that is easy to get wrong, whatever the operating system. I recall a similar thing on Windows, a couple of decades ago, fixed/reduced to much fanfare if memory serves correctly.

Is it really unrelated? I dunno, maybe my distaste for certain development styles is leading me to see things that aren't there, but I fell like the Linux Desktop hacked-together "it's good enough for me" way of doing things is creeping into paid OSs like Mac and Windows.

"The desktop" is suffering from the same complexity breakdown that AAA gaming suffers from. It's hard -- and getting harder -- to produce a cohesive properly developed and QA'd AAA game because gamers now expect something way beyond the capabilities of a surgical team of 10-50 people. To even ship a AAA title requires a team of hundreds and a budget of tens to hundreds of millions. and when you're dealing with an wndeavor that large, it's difficult to enforce quality and cohesiveness at every level throughout the development process.

Desktop environments are now reaching that threshold because users demand "modernity" and fanciness. They would be fantastically served by a desktop with the capabilities of Windows 9x, MacOS 7.x, or AmigaOS 3.x, but they demand much more than that, and the Windows and MacOS teams (and code bases!) have bloated in size to meet this demand.

These problems showed up much earlier in Linux because in order to release a desktop OS, you need someone exercising strict control over all aspects of the system from the kernel (and even lower than the kernel, like the hardware and firmware) all the way up to the shell, GUI toolkit, and other user-visible features. You need that leadership to define and prioritize work and even prioritize OS concerns. (For example, a desktop OS should handle keyboard/mouse interrupts IMMEDIATELY.) You need to enforce a single set of user concerns on everybody, and fire anyone who doesn't play ball. And with Linux and open source, good luck getting everybody on the independent kernel, libc, X, and GUI projects to cooperate this way.

Me, I've always been content with like fvwm95 (or lately, i3) and whatever independent programs I needed for desktop tasks. And if I have to say 'pm-suspend' at a command prompt to put my computer tk sleep, so be it. I can see the many hands all making the world a slightly better place, and since their work is all loosely coupled, it all sort of hangs together and is very robust. Conventional desktops are brittle to start with, and made even more so under Linux because of those issues I mentioned.

> Desktop environments are now reaching that threshold because users demand "modernity" and fanciness.

Do they? Do they really? Because I struggle to think of a change made in how I or anyone I know's desktop works that we actually think made things better. The last one I can think of was when Windows added start-typing-search to the start menu back in, what, 7?

I'm not dismissing that other people might be demanding some "modern"/"fancy" features, but if so what the heck are they? What I see is GUI redesign for the sake of it, or hiding of options in order to promote more "desired" (by the vendor) options.

Mac OS has gone downhill for sure, but I meant unrelated technically.

I have had this start happening on Windows 10, except instead of a split second, it could be several seconds, during which I could even launch and start using applications, before it finally locks. To get around this risk, I always lock using Win+L now, before closing the lid.

I haven't seen that in default Gnome for years, but it still happens when using i3 or Regolith.

This still happens to me. Asus UX305UA, Xubuntu 19.10 with xscreensaver.