Headless means connecting remotely to perform tasks. This does not use the monitor, keyboard, or mouse connected to the Ubuntu computer. It does require having the SSH service for remote command line and also a VNC server to access the GUI.
How to set up my data science platform. This includes Anaconda, Python, R, and Julia. All of these are runnable from the desktop, from a headless connection, and from the browser via JupyterHub.