Generally, I think a remote host is not the way to go for a fully functional desktop (for that, try a desktop computer!) But, it would be helpful to have a desktop for those used to such a thing, so as suggested in several of those posts from the Digital Ocean community, try a low-weight desktop. For the most part, what you really want (I think) is a file manager, maybe a couple of graphical based terminal windows, a browser, and not much else. That lets you find the stuff you are working on, look stuff up on the web to copy and paste or whatever, and mess with things.

What concerns me is that lightweight desktop don’t get the attention they used to, because hardware capable of handling fancier, more bloated desktops is more typical even at the lower cost end. It would be nice to see a few more posts in the DO community on setting up minimal desktops that would work across distros.

Great to know that Digital Ocean scans the internet for stuff on DO!

As I noted in the post, but to emphasize again, DO has a lot of tutorials and an active community.

Also, while we have removed pre-configured Desktop images we do provide several user-data scripts here: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-add-swap-on-ubuntu-14-04

These scripts can be used on an Ubuntu 14.04 droplet to automatically deploy a desktop environment along with x2go (which has improved performance and security over VNC). To use these scripts, select the default Ubuntu 14.04 image on the create page, check the “user-data” checkbox and paste in the script. Then click create. Your droplet will be created and the script automatically run in order to set up your new desktop.

Thanks again for the great feedback!