An excellent example Lee! Indeed that is how X was designed: to run tasks on a remote server and consume them on thin clients. I must point out that Unity actually does not implement this technology within it's core, an is supported via a compatability layer for the moment. Not sure if this layer will stick around in the future. <div class="gmail_quote">On May 29, 2014 2:33 AM, "Lee Sharp" <<a href="mailto:leesharp@hal-pc.org">leesharp@hal-pc.org</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"> On 05/28/2014 12:05 PM, Bill Cairns wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"> Thanks Lee but, well, that's the question I am asking I would like to be able to run a normal Unity environment on machine B while actually running on machine A. And I mean run everything including Office, Gimp, Scribus ... Perhaps the right answer is: why would I want to do that? ! Because it's there I suppose. Remember - I don't have a monitor on B. I don't understand the implications of ssh -X. What would I do next? </blockquote> That explains your question. Connect to a remote system with "ssh -X user@ip.address" and you will have a command line. Now type "gimp" and hit enter. Gimp is now running in a window on your desktop, but it is running on the remote machine. This is not a remote desktop and image data is not being transfered... It is actually displaying on your desktop. Other handy commands are "nautilus" "firefox -no-remote" and so on... And unlike the current clickbait headlines, this really will blow your mind. Lee -- ubuntu-za mailing list <a href="mailto:ubuntu-za@lists.ubuntu.com" target="_blank">ubuntu-za@lists.ubuntu.com</a> <a href="https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-za" target="_blank">https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-za</a> </blockquote></div>