What is the best way to connect to a remote blender program on a more powerful computer from a macbook?

I have an Ubuntu machine that I want to render on if not design on remotely from my macbook. Right now it's set up so that I can VNC into the Ubuntu machine and run Blender on there, but I feel like leaving my machine unlocked as well as running on screen somewhere else is at the very least bad security. I read about running blender over ssh, then I read about distributed rendering, which was apparently taken out of blender? But can still be done with addons?

What are the best practices for offloading compute time onto another machine?

Edit:

The VNC doesn't work because for whatever reason, it interprets panning as scrolling. I remapped the keys so it rotates and pans with shift right click and alt right click so it will work for my workflow if there's no better solution