X11 transports just fine over SSH. You can have a window in your own desktop that is drawn by a process running remotely, and it looks and feels just like it is local.

We gave up X11 for the unfulfilled promise of something greater. A tech tale as old as time.

Is Wayland really that bad though? I switched from Awesome to Hyprland, and the gaming support (VRR, HDR), among other things is much more straightforward. For normal desktop usage, I haven't seen much of a difference. Certainly not a negative one.

Wayland completely punted on the remote display capabilities of X11. There has been no effort to replicate this functionality. If you switch to Wayland, you can no longer run GUI apps through SSH.

I've generally had good experiences with the various compressed X11-like tools. One example is x2go, but there are a few.

oh man, I haven't thought about xpra in a while! Xpra was a layer of indirection between X clients and X server so you could ssh in, run eg firefox, disconnect, and then reconnect and pick up Firefox where you left it.

You can also serve a window server over ssh