[jabl]

IIRC you can (or at least could 10+ years ago) start it without the GUI with "matlab -nojvm".

[komadori]

I used to do that too back when I used MATLAB professionally (also circa a decade ago), but I found with each successive release it worked less and less reliably as use of Java spread through MATLAB's internals.

[Serow225]

You can run it headless but with JVM, that’s pretty much the actual usable equivalent now.