It is semi-server like. Accessible via network/ssh do to workloads on..
on the other hand also with gui and preinstalled programs (vscode, python, ..) so that temporary student workes have a workplace additionally to their laptop/pc-pools. And it sometimes is easier to just "work on the machine" in front of you with gui than using SSH (i mean .. they are historians.. not computer science students).
@star especially because my git-repos that they fork for things have a direnv & default.nix setting up additional properties if necessary.
so .. for non-root users that work on a narrow set of things it IS quite good.
(also setting up zfs on 2 different sized HDDs with raid the size of the smaller disk and "overflow" on the bigger one additionally to ext4 on / is quite tricky with other OS .. 😅 )