Haven’t done it in ages but I used to run xquartz on a macbook and do x window forwarding from my desktop. It worked surprisingly well, even on remote sessions via an ssh tunnel.
I don’t have much reason to do it nowadays because laptops are so much more powerful and storage is so cheap that the stuff I was doing can all be done locally.
Couldn’t figure out how to access my headless server’s desktop environment via VNC without a monitor connected and turned on. I bought a hardware displayport dummy adapter to pretend to be a real display to get it to work.
A hardware solution to a software problem… felt really wrong.
I’ve since wrapped my head around tmux and managing all my services via command-line or web-ui so I have no need for it anymore.