I have a pre-built EC2 AMI with RStudio I use to study R. I can use it from
my Mac or Windows machine. It is nice.

I want an EC2 Ubuntu 16.04 AMI to use as an affordable cloud based Linux
machine to play with toys, like teaching myself Haskell. Take lappy for
coffee, get internet on the phone. Do Haskell exercises. Go home. Continue
exercises on desktop. (I can run Linux virtual guests on both the Mac and
Windows machine.)

Unfortunately, it looks like using the image is a sysadmin challenge, not
least because if you want a GUI, you have to get it working on your own.
I'm way down the sysadmin learning curve, compounded by the fact that I
usually don't enjoy system administration chores.

Has anyone got some useful thoughts?

Trent