I may be misunderstanding, but I'm not sure I want a "remote desktop" where every process runs on the remote. I want the original promise of X, where I choose

I may be misunderstanding, but I'm not sure I want a "remote desktop" where every process runs on the remote. I want the original promise of X, where I choose where apps run and they are displayed locally: • Run CAD circuit layout app on Pro server. • Run Adobe Premiere on GPU server. • Run distributed `make` on build cluster. And of course, I want to be billed in resource-seconds, not per hour of a host made available to me.