With Ubuntu starting to push their snap architecture, more and more apps break using old school X11 remote display methods. With traditional applications, you can just ssh to a remote host with -X or -Y to get X11 forwarding. You just run the X11 command, and it’ll “magically” come back and display on your local workstation. snaps, by design, are sandboxed and do not work “magically” without a little pixie dust to help it know where to look. It turns out, it’s pretty simple. All you need to do is set the XAUTHORITY environment variable to tell it where your .Xauthority file resides, so it knows where to find the authenitication tokens.
Place the following in your shell’s profile:
export XAUTHORITY=$HOME/.Xauthority