I feel like NGINX is simplest to configure. And it’s in the repos already, so I don’t see the advantage here.
Easy to do redirects, directory listings, serving a static website, setting mime types of specific files, basic user authentication, using HTTPS, using it as reverse proxy, limiting request types, limiting bandwidth, and making the directory listings far nicer with fancyindex module. That’s all I need and it’s pretty simple to do with NGINX. I don’t know what the Python HTTP server does, nor how to use.
How are you using it remotely? VNC?
Perhaps the server config started defaulting to XFCE. Maybe what happened is entire XFCE DE got marked as a dependency, installed during update, and then when some config defaulting to XFCE thanks to this became valid, you ended up here.
If it’s VNC, what do you have in
~/.vnc/xstartup
? Maybe a line likexfce4-session &
?