It seems to me that if a process is misbehaving, it is a problem for that process alone, not for other processes and especially not for the host operating system.
Yet time and time again Windows 10 is vulnerable to episodes of unresponsiveness, even to the point of having to resort to a power cycle.
Today I opened Edge and Firefox, along with Visual Studio (not doing anything). I also had a VirtualBox VM was running Ubuntu. Its only activity was a terminal session running top.
The browsers had 5 or 6 open tabs. Most tabs were static pages just sitting there. From Edge I had a video stream playing and was attempting a screen recording using a browser extension.
Left for 5 minutes after which I could barely get a response from any app or Windows. Video stream was hung. Mouse would move but if I clicked on a tab or app nothing happened. Ctrl-Alt-Del did nothing. Click on upper right 'X' on any application did nothing. Right click an application group in the task bar and select 'Close all windows' did nothing. Right-clicking an empty spot of the task bar did not launch a pop-up menu.
Alt-Tab worked, sort of. It would show its list of windows. But releasing Alt-Tab for any window did not switch to that window.
Technically, what is it about Windows that allows applications to bring the entire system to its knees???
It is a question I've asked for as long as I've used Windows (Dabbled with Windows 1.x and 2.x, became regular user with Win 3.1)
Tho' Windows' reliability improved over the decades, it continues to be vulnerable to apps, services and drivers that veer off into the weeds.
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?
A) hardware error. Esp memory. Rare, but that just makes it harder to spot.
B) ram. If your open programs exceed physical ram then virtual mem kicks in, and it is slow. If the working-set ram is below physical ram the machine thrashes making it more or less unusable
C) cpu. Programs can gobble cpu generally slowing the machine down. This is less noticeable these days with multiple cores. I don't think this is the cause of your problem but inspecting task manager can be helpful.
D) drivers running in ring 0.these can crash a machine, but bad drivers these days for out the box hardware is very uncommon.
You got browsers, VS, a video and even a VM: all stuff that are famous for eating your RAM.
> Left for 5 minutes after which I could barely get a response from any app or Windows.
Most probably because inactive apps were swapped out, then when you came back everything had to be swapped in.
I don't know the specifics of tuning this on Windows, but on Linux you have the "swappiness" levels, and you probably have something similar in the NSA OS.