[pxc]

For me, definitely yes, because it's rootless. Being able to stream individual windows is an absolutely killer feature. Having to deal with non-native window management is a nightmare, not to mention that it leaves you pulling down more pixels than you need to.

Microsoft has similar functionality but it's gated behind enterprise licenses. I ran Xpra for free when I was a kid and it was magical; many years later I've still never played with Windows' Terminal Services, which is the MS thing that can do rootless IIRC. The way MS gates the necessary windowing features is why to this day you can't do rootless with X2Go or Xpra with normal Windows clients.

Is there special reason the usual GUI PolKit privilege elevation wrappers can't work with a remote X session? I think I used to be able to use kdesu and similar just fine over Xpra. Note that 'rootless' in this context (windowing) means 'without a root window', i.e., without rendering a desktop. It has nothing to do with the usage in projects like podman where 'rootless' means 'not requiring elevated privileges'.

[JackeJR]

Use this to get the functionality without setting up a windows server instance https://github.com/kimmknight/remoteapptool

[philsnow]

Rootless is a good UX especially if you use a tiling window manager locally, because of the cognitive dissonance when one of your tiled windows is a remote fvwm desktop or similar.

Likewise, I think the overwhelming majority of tiling window managers are very keyboard-oriented, so if you use the same or a similar one on a remote rooted vnc session, there will be conflicts between local and remote keybindings unless you're really careful about it. Better to just let the local WM manage everything.

[metadat]

Xpra can also stream rootless single windows, to html5 or other Xpra clients. I found it annoying with a bunch of sharp edges compared to getting a full desktop, though. You must have a different use-case :)

[pxc]

I used to use WinSwitch instead of just plain Xpra, which was nicer. I think it may be unmaintained now.