When you need it you need it, no matter how often.

in grad school we used it to share very powerful workstations without getting out of the office.

Sometimes I need to use a GUI program on my Desktop while I'm away. It might be something as silly as adjusting a parameter on a simulation run.

Sometimes I want to start a program on a remote computer (say VLC on my kids laptop downstairs)

Embarrassing admission - sometimes I know how to adjust a setting from the GUI and not from terminal. Maybe I want to mute a computer downstairs (btw, just an example. I'd use alsamixer, if killall weren't an option).

Honestly, I'd use it a lot more if it were faster and less laggy. Daily, even.

I think there's a lot of potential for "run an app remotely, draw it locally". A crippled, single-application version of that's an entire, recent, highly-publicized startup, even (the controversial remote-Chrome-as-a-service company that's been posted about quite a bit in the last couple months).

I think it's not widely done because Apple and Microsoft haven't put out good tooling for it. If one of them released that kind of thing as a high-quality, polished feature, I bet it'd be big.

Also, IMO the default set-up and behavior for it on Linux machines isn't very good (shocker, that). Much better would be persistent remote sessions that let you drop your connection on one machine and re-connect on another, and leave them running indefinitely when not connected. You can get that working with some extra software but it's a bit janky and the UX is nerd-only, like most of this stuff.

>> until you need to forward X, which I sometimes find very useful (on a LAN it's not too bad)

> Other than that I never do it.

If we got rid of all the features that someone never uses (or even a lot of people never use), we wouldn't have any features anymore.