Well, in fact, yes, I now find that you can get VNC vino to work in headless mode.
First, you buy an HDMI “dummy” dongle like this one:
At boot time, the OS thinks a full HDMI monitor is attached.
You must then configure gnome to log you in without a password.
I would follow these two narratives:
Get vino set up properly:
To enable login without a password:
When I do this, I’m essentially sharing the session with myself (but I’m the only user anyway), with the full gnome desktop that I would get with a real, physical monitor, not some crippled version.
So now the Jetson nano joins my other SoCs: Raspberry Pis and Odroid N2 as accessible in full desktop mode when I need it.