I think Pop_OS uses Gnome by default, and I haven't changed it. I suppose it wasn't really the server's GUI I needed, I juat wanted a desktop environment in general so I could start and configure the server in a familiar way. Really, the only thing I figured I needed VNC for was double-clicking the startup script and editing text files. I'm starting to understand this was a pretty inefficient way to run a server though... I think I'll give up on the VNC idea since it sounds like there are much better ways to do this. I'll look into systemd and rcon next, thanks!