I’m a professor of Religious Studies with a research focus on medieval Islam, particularly with regard to Sufism, the occult sciences, and manuscript culture. I also interested in all things linux, occult, scifi, UFO, and anarchist.
You say this machine is headless. Is it at a remote location? If not, is it feasible to connect it to a monitor an keyboard for a few minutes? If so then you could logout, switch DE, and then log back in. That would hopefully set the DE you prefer as user default.
If that’s not possible, then some of the solutions discussed here might be applicable.
I work for a large state university and run linux on my office machine, despite the fact the IT office dept doesn’t officially support it. I told our IT guy once what I’m doing and his response was, “cool.” Of course I’m totally on my own if anything goes wrong. It helps that I’m a prof and most of my on-campus work doesn’t involve much time on a computer, aside from basic web and documents stuff. tldr, in my case I’m able to just do it without asking anyone’s permission, and it’s worked out great for several years now, but a lot of jobs aren’t like that obviously.
I’ve used herbstluftwm on my main desktop for years. Love it. Manual tiling works well for me. Totally flexible and customizable. Switch between floating and tiling with a keypress, etc.
And then on various other machines.
You have to enable it, but once you do it can do them automatically.
Linux Mint Debian Edition. Very windows-like + automatic updates = ideal for people who don’t really want to have to learn anything new (assuming your parents are like mine in that respect).
But isn’t that every linux forum?