How are you using it remotely? VNC?
Perhaps the server config started defaulting to XFCE. Maybe what happened is entire XFCE DE got marked as a dependency, installed during update, and then when some config defaulting to XFCE thanks to this became valid, you ended up here.
If it’s VNC, what do you have in ~/.vnc/xstartup
? Maybe a line like xfce4-session &
?
He looks like he’s about to give you a quest.