> Having a GUI on the thing lets me leave all kinds of things running persistently in the background that might be bothersome if interrupted running on my laptop.

Unless you actually need GUIs, you could just use screen/tmux or the newer versions like zellij/etc.

I use screen extensively, the GUI is for leaving things like QGIS running full screen (which is sure not going to work in a TUI). Both CLI environment and GUI get used.