they do not work for individual applications

as someone else replied to you earlier, waypipe exists, and is packaged in distros, and does what you’re asking for.

There is also a newer thing called wprs, “Like xpra, but for Wayland, and written in Rust”: https://github.com/wayland-transpositor/wprs#comparison-to-waypipe which sounds promising

Hey holy shit! Someone else who knows this is in there! Two of us!

I got around this just using a local IPC on whichever box and a wlroots compositor (I think river right now? They’re all tiny). Wezterm is just locked in a remote multi plexed session I can fire scripts from the one with a keyboard. Startup isn’t really noticeable in wasted time, but it isn’t nothing. Consider this a promise to circle back if I do find something, it would have been a pain in the ass at another job.

Broadly I think it’s funny a lot of the same people who taught me the Unix philosophy don’t seem to understand the irony of refusing to move from the monolith. (Not that that’s you specifically, but Wayland actually gets it right for the most part).

The defense you hear from people like me is less fingers in ears that there are problems, and more the response to people who have tried nothing and are out of ideas on how to arrive at the same place differently. Im currently doing several things I was AGGRESSIVELY informed were impossible and wouldn’t ever be, but there’s so few people using some of the functionality in xorg I wonder if its back to hacking things together with pipes and scripts for the niches, remote display pretty much has been superseded by the common web server.

I started IT hearing stories of migrations back and forth from xorg/plan 9, and I did some of the troubleshooting in the early xorg era. you can trust me or not when I say I will choose the situation with xorg/Wayland now infinity times over that.

And there is were the community has kind diverged. Now days it is either headless servers or desktops.

Running individual apps is interesting but I am afraid that it is not super practical in 2024. However, there is this: https://github.com/udevbe/greenfield

Xorg is no longer being maintained for the most part and because the code base is so large there isn’t anyone who understands the codebase. I still use it for my semi virtual PC as Xorg allows for a lot more flexibility than Wayland plus Xfce4 isn’t completely ported yet. There will be a day when I move completely though. Probably when Xfce4 is Wayland native.