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The firejail and Xpra combo gives us process isolation (memory, filesystem, process space, bandwidth, Linux caps...) and X11 isolation NOW. That is the demostration that it can be done. It started years ago, the concept of jails is pretty old in Unix, and Xpra started before 2014 (0.11 version), while Xephyr (& Xvfb) is(are) even older (and the fallback in case firejail can't find Xpra when asked to give protection for X11).

Integrate the ideas, make the system easier and we get a lot better than Wayland, with no rewrites, compatible out of the box, and should be possible to disable as needed.

But rewrites are better for job security. You can do them over and over if you can blame the need of a new one in something else.

Check out Xpra. It's like screen for X. You can attach and detach as desired including recovery from a lost connection. It looks a lot like regular old X forwarding otherwise.

You should take a look at Xpra. It is essentially screen for X, plus it works well over slow networks.

Xpra been around for ages.

In that case what you want is xpra. Each window is rendered off-screen and forwarded individually, as a compressed video stream (x264 if it's available). You can detach from the xpra server and reattach later, from the same client or a different one, with all your applications intact. A lot like how Wayland remoting will work, really, except that in Wayland it will be better integrated due to not needing to support all the legacy parts of X11.

As a downside, it does not allow applications to be displayed on a remote desktop and for example VNC has to be used instead.

The use of a vaguely VNC-like protocol optimized for forwarding compressed video over a network rather than the X11 protocol optimized for primitive drawing operations very few applications actually use is not a downside. If you prefer, think of it as X11 as it's actually used by modern applications (a series of pixmaps), but with compression and fewer latency-sensitive round-trips. Or even better, like xpra with fewer rough edges.

Have you tried using Xpra?. It does exactly that with X. It works great over the internet, and lets you attach and detach X applications across X servers. Basically, it's screen for X.

3. It needs some kind of middle layer so that you can move applications between displays, and displays between consoles. Think something like screen or tmux. Once you launch an app on a display, it is stuck there.

I know I'm late to the party, but you can do this using xpra. Still works around the x display idea though, so you can't attach/detach individual windows, but you start them attached to xpra then you attach your x display to xpra. So very much like screen, but I think tmux has some more advanced functions to move windows between tmux sessions.

• * NX is now closed source (v4 onwards) and the old branch (v3) is no longer maintained.
• * Xpra absolutely kills everything else in terms of performance and features.

If you need a GUI on top of that (not sure you really do):

• * Xpra has a limited GUI session launcher (but only for connecting to existing sessions at the moment)
• * NX has a number of management tools - beware, most of them are abandoned or buggy and insecure..
• * winswitch handles both and more (VNC, RDP, ssh -X, ...)

Disclaimer: Xpra and winswitch maintainer.
You did do a google search first, right? Did you miss this answer?
AFAICT, most of the other posts talk about virtualizing and other irrelevant topics.

I haven't used it myself, but maybe this does what you want?

http://xpra.org/

Or is this the same as the XRDP situation? Although, I don't really understand what you mean by "simply move it to another server" in the Windows context.

Can you really start an executable on one machine and move the running executable to another machine? Your comment further up merely says:

Which one of those lets me start an application on one machine and then continue using it on another machine like Windows has been able to do for well over a decade?

To me, this sounds like RDP: connect from a client machine, start an application on the server, disconnect, reconnect later from another client to continue using the application. The application itself is still running on the same server machine.

xpra does this on Linux, Windows, OSX and Android (beta).
It's free and it's open-source.
It also does x264 encoding when needed and is available for all your machines now without any strings attached.

Seriously, using Xvnc to forward your ssh session just to deal with disconnections? That is so backwards.
xpra is way better than this, and even NX, despite being old and closed/abandoned is still better than this, and both are seamless.

I haven't tried splashtop, and it being closed source I doubt I will in a hurry, but I reckon xpra is probably on par with it when it comes to performance - we also use x264 encoding where appropriate - and this is the keyword: where appropriate (like video, fast moving animations, etc), in many other cases it's not..

xpra.org may be worth a try. Although it is not a "remote desktop" solution but a seamless remote application solution.