Now I'm trying wayland on the client side. So far things work, except the keyboard mapping problem is back. Every time I reconnect when I hit caps in emacs (running on server) it is not mapped to ctrl. Using xfce on server (kde on client) I seem to each time need to open keyboard settings (xfce) and fiddle with it toggling the cryptically-named Alt+ctrl keyboard variant setting and then my mapping works again.
Any suggestions? It would be great if it just worked, like it did on X11. But if I could just run a cli command to fix it on the server each time I connect I could also live with that.