'ssh -X' not working

[john163]

Oh. I mean you could set up an SSH tunnel then set the proxy in the local browser to go through the tunnel then out to the network / Internet from there. Is that the desired goal here?

These two laptops are on the same network. They sit right next to each other. I just want to be able to use apps on my personal laptop while sitting on my work laptop. No need to overcomplicate things!

[TheFu]

I've been running lots of remote apps on other systems here using ssh -X for decades, including firefox, thunderbird, EasyTag, and probably 30 other GUI programs.
With firefox and thunderbird, I have to add the -no-remote option to ensure the remote binary is actually used.

I don't use Wayland on any of my systems, so I don't know if that matters.

This firefox window I'm typing into now is running on a Mint 21.3 system. I'm sitting behind a minimal Ubuntu 20.04 box. Same for thunderbird. I just got tired of fighting with Canonical about snap packages. I have yet to find any desktop snap that works as well as the normal repo, debian package for my needs, so when that has been removed as an option - thanks Canonical, NOT! - time to work around it. There are a few complexities with integrations between local and remote running programs, but not having a GUI, bloated, web browser on my local workstation is a good start to prevent all sorts of security risks.

Anyway, ensure both sides aren't using Wayland. That's my first suggestion, but I know absolutely nothing about what actually should be supported by Wayland or not.

[cainesaj]

So this is weird... when I connect, firefox and another application that I care about are launched on the remote host, but xclock is launched on the local host!

The good news is that you have X11 forwarding correctly over your ssh tunnel. X11 clients such as xclock and xeyes will appear on your local X11 server.

What won't work as easily or at all are clients which either aren't X11 clients or which depend on (what I will broadly categorise as) desktop integrations. You may be able to get them tunneled by divorcing them from their local display, using tools such as dbus-launch, or other tricks, but with the migration from X11 to Wayland, the deeper integration of applications into desktop environments, and applications moving to container-like environments such as Flatpak and snap, the network transparency feature of the X11 client-server model (which is effectively reproduced through the tunnel) will continue to decrease in usability; and the effort involved in testing, making, and keeping it working will become excessive [much like this sentence].

Options using VNC and RDP remain, but only as a replacement for XDMCP rather than a network-transparent client-server model. These, too, are increasingly integrated into desktop environments.

$ ssh user@desktop 'xwd -display :0 -root -silent -out /tmp/x.xwd && xwud -in /tmp/x.xwd -noclick -display :0'

[TheFu]

$ ssh -X deneb firefox -no-remote &

working here. Just started a new firefox instance with that exact command.
My usename is the same on both systems.
"deneb" is the LM 21.3 system.
Don't know what else to say. Using this sort of remote application running is a way of life for me. I have about 10 windows displayed on my workstation that are all running on other systems. That includes my main firefox, thunderbird, and a number of terminal ssh sessions into non-desktop systems.

Be certain you are using the Xorg server on the local workstation, not Wayland. That's my only guess for a possible problem and I have doubts that would actually be an issue at this point, but I don't know. I don't use Wayland.