"I use ssh. I can login, edit, develop, run, basically anything. What am I missing?" You're not missing anything and you have an extremely efficient and secure

"I use ssh. I can login, edit, develop, run, basically anything. What am I missing?" You're not missing anything and you have an extremely efficient and secure workflow that runs laps around any of this. The tradeoff is you work in a terminal and understand SSH, etc., which is too much to ask of many non-technical users. If you wanted to obfuscate your traffic or the direct path to your remote host was blocked for some reason, a VPN might get you there, but you'd still run SSH over that VPN and your workflow should remain unaltered (albeit, higher latency). To address a sibling posts comment, you can enjoy this very same workflow without exposing your sshd to the global Internet by placing it behind a "knock" with knockd. Highly recommended.