Do a Desktop install and then do apt-get remove ubuntu-desktop; apt-get autoremove and poof, you're almost as lean on install as you would have been installing from the Server disc to start with.

Nearly all Linux distributions could serve as either a desktop or server OS. It's not like you'd want to slap a desktop environment onto Ubuntu Server and use it as a desktop OS, but you could ...

While a desktop GUI isn't present on a headless server, you can still install various web-based management interfaces to handle your server. I personally use Portainer to manage my Docker ...