It seems to me there are two camps when it comes to the Raspberry Pi. Some people use them as little PCs or even laptops with a keyboard and screen connected. But many of us use them as cheap Linux servers. I’m in the latter camp. I have probably had an HDMI plug in a Pi only two or three times if you don’t count my media streaming boxes. You can even set them up headless as long as you have an Ethernet cable or are willing to edit the SD card before you boot the machine for the first time.
However, with the Raspberry Pi 4, I wanted to get to a desktop without fishing up a spare monitor. I’ll show you two ways to get a full graphical KDE desktop running with nothing more than a network connection.
The same principle applies to most other desktop environments, but I am using KDE and Ubuntu on the Pi, even though something lighter would probably perform better. But before we get there, let’s talk about how X11 has had a big identity crisis over the years.
The Plan
There are many ways to remotely access X programs, many of which are rarely used today. However, for this purpose, we are going to use SSH tunneling along with some special tricks to get the entire desktop running. It is easy to just run a single X program over SSH, and you’ve probably done that often. If so, you can skip to the next section.
