[`xpra`](http://xpra.org/) allows one to run persistent X applications on a remote host and display it on a local machine. It's a combination of [SSH X11 Forwarding](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/OpenSSH#X11_forwarding) and [Screen](https://www.gnu.org/software/screen/).
To get started you need to install the `xpra` package on both the server and client. On Ubuntu 18.04, this package isn't configured properly so one should use this PPA instead.
```bash
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mikhailnov/xpra
```
To install,
```bash
sudo apt install xpra
```
Now you can from the client open up an application with one command
If you want it to behave more like screen. Then on the server.
```bash
xpra start :100
```
Where you can replace `:100` with another high display number.
Then you can run the executable,
```bash
DISPLAY=:100 executable
```
From the client,
```bash
xpra attach ssh:user@host:100
```
`xpra` has heuristics that determines the encoding of the images passed. You can however override it using the `--encoding`s flag to better tailor to your needs.
-`rgb`: Raw pixel format that is lossless and uses compression. Best in high bandwidth environments.
-`png` compressed, lossless, but CPU intensive. May result in skipped frames
-`h264`, `vp8`, `vp9` are lossy formats that have tunable quality and speed parameters
