I've never plugged a monitor, keyboard or mouse into any of my Raspberry Pi computers!
All my interaction has been done via an SSH session. When first setting up Raspbian with "sudo raspi-config", I disable the "boot to desktop option"... I figured the less the CPU has to do... the better!
I use the free version of MobaXterm to connect to and interact with my Linux based devices/computers... including my Raspberry Pis.
MobaXterm also initiates a SFTP session (over SSH using SCP) and has a built in X Server for X11 forwarding. X11 allows me to view Linux GUI programs via MobaXterm on my Windows PCs.
