Thanks Rob, Donald,
I’ve ended up installing locally on Windows (didn’t work for me at first because I stubbornly refused to follow your great instructions and tried to use WSL instead of msys2).
I’m happy to help debug if you’d like, but I won’t be using mrview/VNC now. Actually, I suspect the error, on further looking through the user guide, may be that the remote VM may not have had OpenGL 3.3 capability.
Thanks!