I did the other way round. An old nuc from 2013 turned into a gui-less debian selfhosted server (yunohost) for 2.5 years, until my old laptop (2008) died. Then I installed xfce on top, plugged a wireless keyboard/touchpad combo + hdmi to my TV, and use it as a desktop mainly for web browsing, open office and some gimp processing. But just once a week or so.