netinst'd Stretch, LXDE
Configured desktop to have the panel at the top, reduced down in width to allow for 3 gkrellm's (disk, cpu, net) ... so activity flashing is still visible when a window is full screen (panel showing)
2 border/title-less xterms set to load at startup, one showing part of htop, the other a command line ... somewhat as though they were part of the desktop wallpaper (set to be below other windows). Sloppy mouse set so mouse over a window sets it as being focussed and for those xterm windows alt-enter toggles full-screen'ing on/off (in contrast to the more usual alt-F11 full screen toggle key combination). Or xterm's Ctrl leftmouse to pop up its menu that includes the FullScreen option.

At startup the larger (bottom) xterm opens mc, with the left pane showing my bin folder and the right pane showing my Documents folder ... ready to mouse click to run or load things.
Clock in the panel/tray has been set to be the MENU button i.e. left clicking the top right clock shows the LXDE menu.