TL;DR: Lost internet mid update, decided to be an idiot and restart my laptop. Turns out it was in the middle of a kernel update, took some puttering to make things work again.
Story time. I have a Mint laptop that I use rarely because of my openSUSE desktop. Because I use it so rarely, every time I turn it on, there will be a kernel update. So today, I turned it on and ran my update script only to have it lose internet halfway through (it was a VPN issue).
Because I can be impatient, I said, "Surely nothing will go wrong," and hard powered off the laptop. Reboot it, and my desktop background is gone. Also, Ctrl+Alt+T isn't working. Actually, nothing except for my desktop icons are accessible. Turns out when I powered off my laptop, it was in the middle of specifically the kernel update (or at least some portion of it).
Through trial and error, I figured out that I got to open exactly one program and have it work as intended. Once I opened a second one, I could no longer go back to the first, and once I opened a third, my keyboard would no longer work.
But I got lucky because I had a folder available on my desktop. I was able to open the file manager, navigate to /usr/bin/gnome-terminal to get that open, and re-run the update script. After rebooting the computer, everything worked as normal, but it was a terrifying moment. Cautionary tale, I guess?
Ah I don't miss those days.
I swapped to using Atomic distributions, no more shenanigans.