Some GUI applications require a full desktop environment to run. Instead of trying to get students to install software locally, we offer a full fledged Linux desktop environment they can access from inside their browser. This is just a different user interface with the same infrastructure. Users are operating in their DataHub home directories.
Try remote desktop on EECS DataHub with a berkeley.edu account, or on Binder without a berkeley.edu account.
Figure 1:Example of image processing with Qt in remote desktop