Raspbian Buster from desktop back to headless?

[gschmidt]

Hi,

I installed Raspbian Buster Desktop with recommended software on a RPi 3b+.
Is it possible to switch back to headless?
And if so, does it benefit the amount of RAM and CPU usage?

[jahboater]

Its probably quickest to just put Raspbian Lite on a new SD card.

Then you have a backup (the old card) in case anything goes wrong.

You may place the old SD card in a USB card reader, plug it into the Pi, and retrieve any files you want.

[gschmidt]

Well I already installed Domoticz, Letsencrypt, Mosquitto (Zigbee2mqtt) and node-red.
This took quite a while...especially Letsencrypt and Zigbee2mqtt (I had to pair all my devices)

[B.Goode]

Hi,

I installed Raspbian Buster Desktop with recommended software on a RPi 3b+.
Is it possible to switch back to headless?
And if so, does it benefit the amount of RAM and CPU usage?

"Is it possible to switch back to headless?"

If you disconnect the display, keyboard and mouse and access the system remotely via a network connection isn't that 'headless'? What else might be involved?

[FTrevorGowen]

Another approach might be to:
a) Uninstall some of the recommended software (that will free up space). This is probably easier with using the Add/Remove software GUI from the Preferences menu.
then b) change the boot option to be to the Command Line rather than the Desktop (gives you the option to use startx to get the Desktop back should you decide to connect a display again for a while.
Personally, since all of my Pi's may be booted with or without a display etc. (ie. sometimes headless, sometimes not.) but I rarely use any of the extra software within that recommended, I prefer to install Raspbian + Desktop and by default, enable boot to command line. In other words, Raspbian Lite is a little too "Light" for me, but, of course, others have different needs/preferences.
Trev.

[HawaiianPi]

I installed Raspbian Buster Desktop with recommended software on a RPi 3b+.
Is it possible to switch back to headless?

Any version of Raspbian can be run on a headless system.

If you mean booting to CLI (the command line interface), without loading the desktop-GUI, that can be set in the Raspberry Pi Configuration utility (change Boot from To Desktop to To CLI).

Not loading the desktop will save some RAM, so if you don't run software that needs a GUI, booting to the CLI will save some memory.

However, it will still be using up storage space on your SD card, so you could free up some storage space by running Raspbian Lite (on another card, if you don't want to lose your current configuration, as jahboater suggested above).

[gschmidt]

Not loading the desktop will save some RAM, so if you don't run software that needs a GUI, booting to the CLI will save some memory.

However, it will still be using up storage space on your SD card, so you could free up some storage space by running Raspbian Lite (on another card, if you don't want to lose your current configuration, as jahboater suggested above).

I only use VNC to connect once in a while, but most of the time I use ssh and winscp. Domoticz and node-red are accessed via a webserver. So I also hardly use the recommended software.
The reason I asked was that I was wondering if Domoticz, Zigbee2mqtt and node-red still can work properly with the RAM and CPU usage that is left over?