Some NUC's have virtual display. This may be the best approach for those:
www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/...33413/intel-nuc.html
I did manage to get my ubuntu 22.04 install to work. This is on a ACEPC mini PC with an i5-5257U CPU. I had it running my Losmandy GM811G mount with ZWO1600 ZWO178 Camera / guide camera last night. It did work better than my RPI4 in the sense that it was faster downloading images. I still have issues though.
- I don't really like the default "unity" style desktop. This is personal taste, but I had to spend a lot of time getting the "classic" to work well. Especially headless.
- Remote display is disabled unless there is a physical display attached (I believe that NUC's have a bios setting to enable a virtual one). There may be some work-around for this in software, like a dummy X server, but I opted for an HDMI dummy dongle. This worked for a few min, then the performance drops and it is basically unusable. The best way to use it is with a standalone VNC server. This is OK, but snap apps fail to run with some cgroup error, and many features are not available, like "shutdown / reboot" I'm sure there are ways to get these things to work, but it's a real time sink.
- Every 20 min or so the connection just freezes. It returns after a bit and I can see that it was running fine, just the VNC connection is frozen. Again another time sink to get this resolved.
Don't get me wrong, I am a long-time Ubuntu user, and generally prefer it's simplicity of use, but in this case going headless has been a great big headache. I may try out UbuntuMate.
-- Update
I've worked on tweaking it this morning. Here's a couple of things that I've done in an attempt to address the vnc freezing.
-Disable cups. It's a snap app and I saw some network errors in dmesg about it. Not sure if this is a real issue, but I turn it off like this:
-disable cups: systemctl disable cups.service cups.socket cups.path
- set ."wifipowersave=2" in /etc/NetworkManager/conf.d/default-wifi-powersave-on.conf to turn off any wifi power saving.
-disable ipv6 in both my wifi and ethernet interfaces.
Seems to be working, but it's hard to tell since it's intermittent.