Just to report the latest bizarreness in desktop crashes. Sometimes the entire screen shuts off or the desktop crashes, but I am still able to launch the terminal because I tied it to a shortcut key. The crashes have been either due to watching YouTube videos, or playing music on Clementine. But of all things, I managed to play 3 hours worth of games with Starcraft 2 using Wine, and barring a few minor stuttering, the desktop did not crash. I am still unsure what the best way to get informative logs would be, since the xsession-errors* file has been uninformative (at least to me).