Dran

I feel the sentiment though, my daily driver is built off of ubuntu-server headless. I find it’s just the right amount of “has searchable solutions for near everything” and “is properly minimal” to base my workstation off of. I run X11, pulse, awesomewm, firefox, lxterm… fairly standard stuff but without gdm, gnome/kde even installed it’s pretty lightweight. The entire os uses ~780mb of ram (+23gb for firefox tabs lmao). It gets the job done, keeps my skills relevant maintaining the automation that builds it, is dead simple to troubleshoot, and has very few black boxes.

For the average user you’re definitely right, but I will say for the sysadmin of headless systems, having a powerful cli editor is a godsend. While it may seem arcane and unnecessary, learning vim is easier than managing remote x or sshfs or copying files to and from a system.

I didn’t learn vim to be a contrarian; I learned it because it seemed (and still seems to be) the path of least resistance for many workflows.