Realistically speaking, what matters is that openssh comes with X11 forwarding built-in.
Somebody should go and provide equally seamless "Wayland forwarding". That might end up looking more like VNC under the hood, but there's nothing inherently wrong with that.
I think GP was talking about how ssh has the -X and -Y flags for forwarding X, but you need to do something like -L XXXX:localhost:YYYY to ssh forward.
TigerVNC (and some others) will do e.g. "-via foo@bar :1" which GP might not know, but is rather convenient.
Xpra is still a better replacement for -X when launching a single application though.
Yes, that's what I meant, and thanks, those are interesting points.
My main use case is launching one-off visualization tools on a remote system that I'm ssh'd to anyway. ssh -X is hard to beat in terms of convenience for that use case, and e.g. a persistence setup would be overkill.
That will call ssh with the correct parameters on both sides and start the app. Seems just about perfect for what people want out of a remote solution that's not a full desktop.
Somebody should go and provide equally seamless "Wayland forwarding". That might end up looking more like VNC under the hood, but there's nothing inherently wrong with that.