I've used this setup for my development environment for several years - giving me a developer desktop I can access anywhere. Even from my mobile phone. I've been fixing bugs, writing code and deployed emergency fixes from the bus, train and mountain tops. The setup is based on a lightweight desktop environment. There are lot of alternatives, but I've chosen fluxbox. From a plain AWS Amazon Ubuntu 16.04 ec2 instance I've started like this: sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install fluxbox Download and extract tigervnc from https://github.com/TigerVNC/tigervnc/releases (I downloaded the binary file from https://bintray.com/tigervnc/stable/tigervnc/1.7.0 named tigervnc-1.7.0.x86_64.tar.gz ) then extract: tar -xvzf tigervnc-1.7.0.x86_64.tar.gz You need to install: sudo apt-get install x11-xkb-utils You need to edit .vnc/xstartup: nano .vnc/xstartup last line replace "twm &" with: fluxbox & Then you can start the