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Desktop Multiplexer for Linux? (GNU Screen for GUI apps)

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GNU Screen and Tmux allow you to run command-line programs on a server, and 'disconnect' from them but let them keep running remotely.

This is great if your primary computer is a laptop and it has to shut down or suspend from time to time depending on power availability but the program can run on a server that never shuts down.

This is also great if your local laptop is not very computationally intense, and the program you need takes a lot of ram.

I need to do this with a GUI program, and I need to be able to copy and paste between the program running remotely and my others running locally, and use the native window-chrome and be able to resize the application's window when viewing it on my laptops.

Two programs I plan to use this with are a CAD/CAM program that has little hope of running smoothly on my laptop without turning the cpu to lava, and a home-automation controller program that is meant for the switches used in my house, but sadly has no 'server' component and is just intended to be "left running on a desktop". (I don't have a desktop anymore...) The program needs to be left running to maintain communications with the powerline communication bus at home to keep track of device state.

In Windows, you have Citrix for this purpose I think. I've heard of FreeNX in linux but it was years ago and I never got it to work right.

Is there a better choice than NX today in modern (2022) linux?

Note: VNC and RDP are not valid options in and of themselves because they run a whole desktop. Virtual machines also are not valid typically because they would also present a whole desktop rather than just an app, and they unnecessarily run their own separate instances of kernel, systemd, services, etc. this is not to say a valid solution can't use VNC or a VM in part, just that VNC/RDP/VMs are not enough in and of themselves.

What is the 'name' of the 'category' of this kind of program? I just guessed 'Desktop multiplexer' based on my analogy to GNU Screen, but if there was an official name for it, I might be better able to find such programs on my own.

I remember fondly X11 forwarding, which would work for instances of compute intensive programs as long as I could save my work each time before the connection drops. But alas so much is moving to wayland today. X11 forwarding takes care of the ... forwarding. but not persistance.

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Maybe x2go does what you want (1 comment)

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Have a look at Xpra. I only use it locally but it's intended to forward from remote hosts as well.

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