Selfhosted

Yeah but all self hosting software is TUI, I mean sure you can use a GUI but at the end of the day you'll need to use a terminal emulator to acturally run the software so there isnt much point in the overhead

I mean if that’s what you think, I can tell you don’t work in the industry. Desktop editions generally have more than just a “prepackaged GUI” on top of a server edition.

• Server editions generally have text based installers. This might not seem like a big deal, until you’re installing on a system that doesn’t have any graphics, just a serial console.
• They almost always have an easy way to do headless and network installations.
• They sometimes have additional security modules, like SELinux, different kernel boot parameters, or even different kernel versions. (Although this is less common nowadays.)
• They’re also missing an audio server (different than a GUI), and usually a print server.
• They can often be GBs lighter, which makes a difference when you’re installing on virtual machines with limited disk space.
• They sometimes use different file systems by default (like Fedora used to).
• They might create different swap setups.
• They usually have very different network defaults. Like, desktop editions usually have a firewall, whereas server editions usually don’t (or it’s not enabled by default).
• Server editions often include terminal tools that desktop editions don’t.
• They’ll sometimes have a different network manager (Ubuntu Server uses systemd-networkd while Ubuntu Desktop uses Network-Manager).
• Server editions almost never come with userland file mounting tools like gvfs.
• Sometimes (like in Fedora) a server edition will come with remote management solutions like Cockpit.
• The home directory skeletons will be vastly different on a server vs a desktop.

That’s just off the top of my head. I’m sure there are plenty more I could find.

Now, since you seem like you might accuse me of it, note that I did not say that a server edition and a desktop edition can’t be swapped back and forth by installing and removing packages and changing a bunch of config. They can. But, it’s not “just” some GUI stuff that makes a desktop edition, and it’s not “just” the lack of a GUI that makes a server edition. They are usually quite different.

Source: I’ve been a professional Linux server administrator for 16 years. But don’t take my word for it. Try it yourself. Install Ubuntu server, then run sudo apt install ubuntu-desktop and see if it’s exactly the same as installing Ubuntu Desktop.