[weblacky]

Oh, with old debians you don’t have to install gui at all. You select a core and not a desktop task/profile. It’s been years but if remember my prompts you removed default-selected stuff and just stay with core-kernel-shell.

After hardware detection it should have asked for what packages to install (after base system was installed), you just unselect “Debian desktop environment”. Then you get a console-only server. That’s how that’s done from install.

Removal will be much worse. Once you have your build recipe down, install a new VM, unselect desktop and print server. Select file server and NFS and you’d be good to start.

I’m old enough where we didn’t have graphical installs on Linux and had to custom configure Xfree86 and such. Also servers were always installed console-only to prevent constant package updates and dependencies.