It turns out that my template Debian VM doesn’t have a DE in it, and that’s why I couldn’t forward the GUI from the VM to my local machine: there was not GUI. I installed XFCE on the VM and now I can run XPipe on the VM from my local computer, without XPipe being installed on my local computer: ssh -X user@vm_ip_address xpipe open
I look forward to playing with XPipe - it looks cool and very helpful!