it seems that there's been a problem where if you don't have a display attached, surface-manager will crash . . which likely means that systemd or upstart or whatever is being used right now, will probably attempt to restart it over and over ...
probably fixing that crash would be a good place to go, first, and then you could probably run whatever you wanted in whatever fashion.
i'm thinking webOS could make a fantastic home-controller type system, i wanted to dig into that on one of the old tablets, but never really got the time to deal with it. An Ethernet connected Pi with webOS would be a fantastic device, IMO, to connect a bunch of disparate home automation devices together.
on the other hand, there's a ton of hardware/software for doing that out there in the market now, unlike a few years ago