Apart from AD and Exchange, the only Windows-only server programs you may need to install are likely to be legacy domain specific, professional kind of stuff. I've seen tax-filing stuff, finance regulation compliance, medical or judicial "solutions" that would only run (poorly) on Windows, usually with mind-boggling requirements (run as domain admin! Server 2003 only!) and they simply won't run without the GUI.
In other words: usually, if you need Windows server, you're going to need the GUI.
Note that I say this as a Linux admin who has only run Windows very occasionally (and reluctantly!) in the past 20 years.
It’s a perfectly fair assertion given the abundance of commercial software in active use which is a “server” written into the back end of a desktop application. They are not written as stand alone Services.
Remember this is the real world we live in, where once a developer learns how to build a Windows application in Visual Studio, everything becomes a Visual Studio app based on the same template. Consider yourself lucky when the developer uses a newer version of Visual a Studio and dotNet than the one they started with a decade ago.
In the perfect world, yes we would be paying developers high salaries and allowing lots of “down time” for retraining into the current version of dotNet, and allowing plenty of time to upgrade legacy applications to current versions of Windows.
In the real world we still have that Windows 2000 server sitting around with a printed sign taped to the keyboard saying, “DO NOT UPDATE: PLEASE SEE JOEL BEFORE TOUCHING” only nobody remembers who Joel is and he left the company before Confluence arrived. All we know is that we can’t even install Remote Desktop Services because when Joel tried that it broke the application software. That sign appeared on the machine a week after that incident because that’s how long it took Joel to repair the server to the point that the application would work again.
Look, as far as I'm concerned and as an SRE, server-side Windows is legacy. (With the only already mentioned exceptions being AD and Exchange.) And client-side Windows is ... well something I don't use personally anyways.
Yep, likewise. I think the only thing that required the Desktop Experience off the top of my head was WSUS, but we have all sorts of other roles running on Server Core without any issues at all.
Sure you can, and what's the value added compared to any Linux? The joy of having to deal with CALs and licensing audits? If you just like writing cheques, RedHat is an option.
The number of roles with no or effectively no Powershell cmdlets is staggering, and remote MMC require punching a dozen holes in the firewall when it even works. Even then there are many roles like iis and adfs that are still effectively broken with no gui.
Apart from AD and Exchange, the only Windows-only server programs you may need to install are likely to be legacy domain specific, professional kind of stuff. I've seen tax-filing stuff, finance regulation compliance, medical or judicial "solutions" that would only run (poorly) on Windows, usually with mind-boggling requirements (run as domain admin! Server 2003 only!) and they simply won't run without the GUI.
In other words: usually, if you need Windows server, you're going to need the GUI.
Note that I say this as a Linux admin who has only run Windows very occasionally (and reluctantly!) in the past 20 years.