But it's not a rented tool. The subscription is to give a developer the ability to work on a project in a sustainable way. It's open source. You can compile it yourself. How is that rented? This is a fairly niche product in the iOS ecosystem, it is also by far the best terminal for iOS. $20 per year is a pittance in the grand scheme of my tech purchases and well worth transforming my iPad into something more than just a youtube machine. I get that we are all sick of subscriptions but I would rather budget for $20 a year and get nice consistent updates and great support on discord over a product that has paid updates where you have to buy a completely new version just so the dev can continued to get paid.
Well said. Blink Shell is one of the few apps that justifies its price point and they have actively worked hard to bring more features to it over the years. Even so, since its release it’s been the best shell app on iOS bar none.
I think you have the wrong mental model for tools that you need to use for work. If you purchase a one-off license for a tool, you are entering an endless undefined relationship with the vendor. What support model are you expecting? You haven't paid for any. If iOS updates tomorrow and your software becomes unusable, does the vendor owe you a fix? What about in 6 months? 12? What if it isn't iOS changing but just something you specifically find buggy? You've paid your money, do you expect the developer to work for free from then on?
By purchasing a subscription what you are doing is committing to a revenue stream so that you know the product is being maintained, updated, and supported. If they don't keep the software supported, up to date, bugfixed? Cancel your subscription. Especially for tools like this - which generally are aimed at people using it for their job - you should be valuing those things. You should be avoiding buying tools from companies who don't have a clear model to continue to support your use over time.
If I purchase a hammer, I expect no support unless it is faulty within a reasonable period after purchase. If there is a fault in that time, the vendor must refund my money or fix the hammer.
If the world stops making nails compatible with my hammer down the line, I don't expect the vendor to do anything about it.
Due to the way apple restricts development on their platform, one has to recompile/reinstall homebrew software every 7 days for it to work, effectively killing FOSS development for people who don't own the bundle/app IDs. I once paid a 100$ to try and contribute support for NFC for an open source app, only to not be able to use my functionality without upstreaming it. Judging from this experience alone, it feels like Apple hates FOSS.
The point isn’t that it’s easy to do but that it’s fully doable for someone that doesn’t want to contribute the $20/year to development of the software.
Been using this for a while on my 2018 iPad Pro for college.
I just SSH into my pc at home and am able to work on all my assignments with neovim. Works well enough to save me from having to buy a laptop since I was able to get this iPad for ~$300 locally on Facebook marketplace. Would recommend to non-power users on a budget (e.g. college students)
Why do people like to suffer? Just get a used Lenovo Carbon that’s a few years old, plop Ubuntu on it and do all of that with a proper computer with a larger screen, good keyboard, and no “tricks” whatsoever. And if the internet connection conks out, you can still do whatever you need to do
Because I use a custom ergonomic 3D printed keyboard due to RSI and do the vast majority of my work at my desktop computer. I love the iPad for being able to do touch focused tasks and the extreme portability. Every once in a while I like to code remotely or even outside. Blink shell connected to my dev server over ssh and neovim allow me to work on the ipad pretty seamlessly. I don't have to buy yet another device that I will only use once or twice a month, and I don't have to put my custom keyboard on top of an existing keyboard built into the device.
It may seem like a weird setup but it really works for me. I put my ipad on a folding stand to boost the height closer to eye level and it's so much more ergonomic than what I used to have with my 15" Macbook Pro.
You're fundamentally misunderstanding the use case. Using an iPad Pro with a small keyboard is a small form factor, often doesn't add to the load in a student's backpack (most of them have iPads for note taking anyway), etc
They're not comparing it to a MacBook, though, they're comparing it to an iPad Pro.
We could go through the whole dance of figuring out which weighs more and what does what with whom and where, but I think it's probably easier to say "different people have different priorities". If what you want is a lightweight Linux laptop, the iPad is never going to give that to you. If what you want is a tablet that you can connect a keyboard to when you want, an X1 Carbon is never going to give you that. And if that is what you want, it's nice that the iPad can run a great ssh/mosh client that's capable of running Visual Studio Code in the cloud.
Not iPad but on iPhone, I SSH into a Linux machine to edit scripts from bed and submit jobs to AWS or cluster with a sleeping partner beside me. Vim works surprisingly well for editing text in this scenario.
In theory one could even do this from the bathroom without the awkward appearance of walking in there with laptop in arm. Hypothetically. I certainly have not tried this, no sir.
Related: I tried to use Github Codespaces (Visual Studio in cloud) on iPad with a keyboard, using a browser.
It works very well, in theory. There is only a slight deal breaker bug. Safari does not properly support clipboard. So copy-paste does not work. It should be very simple to fix as Chrome, Firefox, do on desktop if Safari would care more about web standards. Also you cannot install any other browser in iPad that would have the required support to use copy-paste.
> Which web standard or standards are you referring to exactly?
To the standard of Safari being considered the new Internet Explorer by the general public, so anything that goes wrong online is automatically Safari's fault
Isn't Chrome closer to IE considering it nearly has unilateral control over web standards?
The last hope for web standards is WebKit on iOS. Or, it was. Now that, for better or worse, Apple is being forced to allow other engines on iOS I expect that'll change quickly.
There was a long period of the where IE was far from dominant, but was used in enough places that supporting it was non-optional for many businesses. It was holding the web back.
I think it's that period of IE that people are referring to when they say Safari is the new IE.
Which is hilarious as that period was only possible due to the previous embrace-extend-extinguish period that preceded it. Which is the state Chrome is in now.
Perhaps, but I think Google still has a much stronger incentive than Apple (or Microsoft) for the web to be a viable platform. I don't think they would allow Chrome to languish the same way IE did. Instead it's more subtle moves like nerfing ad blockers.
Here’s a caniuse that compares the latest (experimental or current whichever is newer) versions of Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera, iOS.[1]
Some notable features included everywhere but Safari:
- SVG Favicons
- Custom protocol handling
- asm.js
- Resource Prefetch
It’s not all bad though. There are features safari has that no one else does:
- CSS Filter Functions
- CSS Hanging Punctuation
- Audio Tracks
- Video Tracks
- Device Orientation & Motion Events
- Theme Color Meta Tags
I see two mentions of the clipboard on that page and they both indicate full support in Safari. They don’t indicate that for all other browsers. What are you trying to say here?
I am not interested in the issues you have with those webapps. I am asking what are the bugs of Safari's implementation of the Clipboard API, since in my experience there are none (except maybe https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=222262 if you want to consider it a bug and not a different interpretation of the specs).
I am not interested in what ticket numbers Safari has. I am interested for the fact that I have $1000+ device and the basic web stuff does not work that works in the other browsers. With the premium price I am paying for Apple, I expect them to produce working software, as much smaller companies like Firefox can do it as well.
They have integrated VSCode APIs so that you can run VSCode web locally while editing files either on the iPad filesystem or on a remote server.
You can get a similar experience by running a web version of VSCode, like with Github Codespaces or Amazon's similar offering, but this can be run 100% locally if you want to.
If you're in the EU that should be possible, although the software is still limited to using Apple's public approved APIs since Apple still has a security notarization process software can be installed from third-party sources.
If I remember correctly: iOS is preventing apps from running any generated code that's not signed ahead of time (it's allowed for browsers specifically for JIT but not for IDEs, I believe); spawning processes and loading new dylibs is also forbidden so it's still very inconvenient.
Not even Apple's. I want to be able to get my stuff to and from the iPad directly through my LAN as you can do with desktop computers.
> and what installing Firefox on ios have to do with someone's cloud?
In this context, that's only useful if you do web development?
Besides, tbh anything that only works in the EU is useless for a dev. I like to use solutions that I can pass around to my partners, no matter where in the world they're located.
Mosh is an essential requirement for any kind of mobile work over ssh, combine it with tmux and iTerm2 tmux integration and you can work on a remote server without even knowing it :D
Another alternative is running ssh over Wireguard. It gives you some of the same benefits, like roaming between different internet connections while transparently maintaining connections that are going through the Wireguard VPN connection.
I’ve been happy running ssh over Wireguard instead. Not just as a replacement for mosh but also because I wanted my own VPN in the first place. I use the VPN for connections between my own computers. I don’t bother routing traffic for the wider internet through my VPN although Wireguard can do that too if you want.
I haven’t seen that. My session persists with Tailscale when I’m roaming on my iPhone hotspot to the next day when I am on home WiFi. Only lost a few % overnight on my M1.
If you’re using tmux, mosh doesn’t bring much to the table compared to plain SSH. Tmux will keep everything running and you can easily reattach to that session after a reconnect.
Apps like ShellFish even do this completely transparently so you don’t even notice you got disconnected for a second. No need for mosh there.
I use both iSh and iVim on my iPhone 8 and they both work well. Would not be interested in vscode on a mobile device but vi/vim work well.
Have been casually trying to figure out/install ssh on iSh recently but it’s not configured out of the box and low priority.
iVim and repl.it apps have the best mobile keyboard configuration I’ve used - have lost interest in replit since they were pushing ai so much though.
Ultimately coding on a mobile device is just a toy and I just use a computer for real things
Hate to be that guy, but Samsung DeX is a much closer vision to a "Mobile device that doubles as a usable computer" than an iPad has proven to be since it launched 14 years ago.
Especially if you get one of the Z Fold devices. It's a phone, a small tablet and a pluggable computer - all in one.
Has had great terminal support for the past decade through Termux and can even run Emacs!
I tried the Termux -> Ubuntu -> code-server approach to get vscode running locally on a Galaxy Tab tablet. Since it is a somewhat "real" Ubuntu installation, it is as close as it gets, runs your debugger and compiler and doesn't have many of the limitations found in other terminals (e.g. go compiler does not run on iSH).
But I don't travel much and still prefer laptops with large screens. I do think many people will benefit from this approach. Too sad there are very Samsung tablets around.
(As a side note: I have Samsung Galaxy Tab S7+ and an iPad Pro 12.9, and use the galaxy tab way more than iPad for browsing and watching YouTube videos. The screen is gorgeous and speakers are great, and I rarely find something that iPad has but not on Samsung.)
Do people use DeX as an all-in-one (esp. for development)? I played with it for a bit on my wife's phone and it seemed very cool, but I couldn't tell how useful it would be as a daily driver.
I've seen Youtube videos where a dev take his phone, a keyboard and a portable monitor to a café. While my nerd self love the idea, I also think that if you're carrying a monitor and a keyboard you might as well carry a M1 Macbook Air.
The documentation suggests this works with VS Code remote mode over SSH. Does anyone use that for their daily driver?
(On my Mac, I only use firefox, slack, terminal, vs code in remote mode, and a few built-in Apple apps that ship on iOS and MacOS, so this could close half the software gap between a mac and and iPad device for me. Now, if only apple shipped a keyboard that wasn’t missing buttons, and had a haptic trackpad…).
I previously used a raspberry pi as a development companion to my ipad, now it's an Android phone. Full linux distro (via termux proot along with its limitations) to edit compile run on the go for js/python/java/c/c++/rust. Yes you read right, best development companion device on an Ipad is an Android phone at least for me. Me carry no laptop no more :D
I use it regularly (from the very beginning) and it works great, except that the VS Code instance is a “web” one, and as such quite restricted in terms of what extensions it can run. You also need to install a (free) file system extension for it to actually access any files (local or remote).
The terminal by itself is pretty great, and supports SSH agent forwarding (a key thing for me, that sadly mosh doesn’t handle well).
I haven’t tried it but their approach seems very promising. VS code has some excellent support for working on remote code, and if they somehow manage to make that bridge with an iPad that will be a game changer of sorts for iPad development.
It will of course require you to have an environment to actually run your “cloud” vs code. So it’s still different from developing on a Mac, especially if you want to utilise containers as your default way to run your code “locally”. Which I’m not sure things like GitHub code spaces support.
i'm using it for a while now, i just ssh to my kubernetes development pod and i do everything from there, i have also a code-server instance installed on the pod so i can use vscode as if i was on that machine. blink was really a gamechanger for me as it fits all my needs! but i think i have a job that's the best use case for blink 'cause i'm a backend dev working exclusively on cloud. the only think i don't like is that i cannot scale vscode UI inside blink
Ship a device that is technically more powerful than many laptops, but artificially limit the OS's capabilities in pretty drastic ways, then lift the limitations bit by bit.
Is there a name for the inverse of boiling the frog?
Ah, the iPad Pro: One of the most compact and powerful computing devices of all time. But trying to use even a small fraction of that power requires workarounds like this.
I bought into the idea of the iPad Pro as a coding device 4 years ago; only to have been left very disappointed. And it seems nothing has really changed (although the M series iPads do at least support full screen external monitors now - mine still has black bars).
I won't consider an iPad Pro until I can actually use it as a development laptop replacement. I still see use for the non-pro iPads in my life; but not the Pro.
Every time I see something like this, I'm a bit sad, that we live in a world where tablets (especially iPad M4) have comparable performance to most laptops, but we still cannot run a general purpose OS (macOS/Linux/Windows) on them.
Tablets are surely capable of running VSCode, Docker, VMs, etc. locally, and from UX standpoint, VSCode is basically Chromium, so experience would be the same if these tools ran directly on device.
I agree, but we should also make restrictions on smart TVs and gaming consoles illegal too.
Both the Xbox and PS5 are 100% commodity hardware, not being able to run our own software on it is a really weird limitation. One that people even on HN have accepted while simultaneously ragging on Apple's "walled garden".
And you can say "Actually that is not the case with iPad, you can have your own applications there without rooting it." have you heard of Xcode? still... you are missing the point, you can't even use an iPad to properly code for iPad
But can you use the Xbox itself to locally develop and run your own software? Or do you still need to use another computer or an online service via web browser?
There are many people who can’t afford to buy both a computer and a PS5 and some of them choose to buy PS5. Would be nice to let those people use the PS5 hardware for what it is really capable of, including being able to run a desktop OS on it.
The number of people who can so barely afford a PS5 that they can’t also afford a computer (these are a hell of a lot cheaper than a PS5), but are willing to screw with their PS5 in ways likely to mess it up in one way or another (if only making gaming impossible without further tinkering) is approximately zero.
If you just changed "but" to "and" you'd get your point across with less a sense of whataboutism.
Yes, all platforms should be free. Personally it feels like devices that are marketed as general purpose have a higher expectation that people can use them for general purposes, but it is definitely true that any device you purchase should allow you to run whatever software you want on it.
Because it's an artificial limitation to make the company more money, at the expense of customer experience and the environment (yes, locked-down hardware is also a sustainability issue!).
Ideally, companies would exist to serve the public and so such selfish anti-consumer behaviour would be illegal. Unfortunately, they don't and current law seems to affirm that.
I’d also like to be able to run anything on an iPad. But I know I can’t so I don’t buy it.
I find this notion that companies should do what we want ridiculous. You know the features and capabilities upfront or you can at least and then you can decide to buy or not.
There are many problems with the "just don't buy it" argument. Mainly, that often times, the alternatives have huge unrelated down-sides. Apple makes the best tablet hardware by a large margin, but it's totally locked down. If I want a good tablet, I have bo real alternatives.
No, I'm saying that Apple is so far ahead of the competition and this market is so hard to enter, that they essentially have a monopoly in the category "tablet computer that isn't shit".
And no, it's not that they should make what I want, it's that they should not prevent me from using their device in a way that I want.
Microsoft and Google are not tiny little companies. They have their own operating systems and the resources to make a good tablet.
Microsoft has just announced a tablet running full blown Windows running Qualcomm chips that from all indications is competitive with what Apple makes.
The latest Qualcomm ARM chips were designed by a bunch of ex-Apple folks.
But every hybrid solution sucks in one way or the other. I would much rather work on my MacBook Air M3 with a 2TB SSD and 24GB RAM with a 20+ hour battery life than an iPad Air/Pro with a keyboard and mouse attachment that hypothetically runs MacOS.
What problem are you trying to solve by not having both a MacBook and an iPad?
Cost? Give me a fully decked out MacBook Air + a cheap $349 low end iPad any day over an iPad Pro. Just the specs of the MacBook Air makes it better. As a bonus I can use my iPad as a second monitor.
The M4 in the iPad may be just as capable as an M4 in a future Mac. But the MacBook Air has better battery life and the iPad still makes trade offs between portability and power like less RAM (RAM takes battery), OS optimizations, sustained performance tradeoffs, etc.
Portability? The iPad is so light you don’t even feel it in a backpack. I literally traveled with both the entire year last year.
Short version: my wife and I took one way trips last year across the country visiting over a dozen cities while I worked remotely…
> I find this notion that companies should do what we want ridiculous.
The thing is, we actually have a vote in this by buying or not buying their products. So apparently, too many people are content enough with what Apple (for example) is doing.
Temporarily at best. If I invent fire and lock it down so that only my grill can use it, while also releasing feel good propaganda to convince people that it is the only way fire works, yes it’s more beneficial than not for a time. As society grows around the concept, the artificial limitations begin hindering the elevated stage more than helping.
These companies have convinced unwitting masses that this is in their long-term best interests. I assure you it is not. It is about being controlled, and the invisible limitations placed on an individual when they grow to love their chains.
> Ideally, companies would exist to serve the public
That would not be "companies" in the common sense anymore, but rather something like the East German "Volkseigener Betrieb" or the Russian "design bureaus". Which is something worth considering probably, but then you'd need larger changes, not just some laws that prohibit companies artificial limitations like this.
> Because it's an artificial limitation to make the company more money
Market Segmentation 101.
Even back in VCR days the el-cheapos would let you set (say) 4 recordings, the mid-range 8, and the high-end 16. All the manufacturers did was tie down pins.
Hobbled hardware is a (dis)honorable tradition in tech.
Because it's slowing killing the the environment for kids to learn. Parents give kids an iPad, they don't give them a notebook. Kid has hands tied for really exploring programming.
I'd be willing to bet if the same restrictions were in place in the 80s and 90s that 30-50% of the people who are programmers today wouldn't be programmers because they'd never have gotten started.
There are many excellent web based programming environments that cater for beginners.
As someone who was learning how to develop in the 80s your comment is hilariously ridiculous. It is 1000x easier to learn now with the wealth of tooling, content, AI assistants etc than it was for me trying to learn C++ on a Mac Plus with no internet.
There is Swift Playgrounds, but if you're talking more about general purpose programming - sure. But, I don't think it changes anything. As devices have entered all aspects of our life, the vast majority want to use them as an appliance to take and edit pictures/video, draw, communicate, and play games. To say it's killing the environment for kids to learn feels a bit myopic by implying programming is the only way to learn.
Because we want to. Of course the political capital of bunch of nerds isn't enough to make it happen but while the reasoning is different, I can't buy a new car that I can register without seatbelts, so the concept of making things illegal to buy is not entirely foreign. Of course, those are for safety, but I also can't buy a car that won't do at least 55 for the freeway unless I want a golf cart, so suitability for purpose is another concept. We'd just have to define computer in a legal sense, and then categorize the iPad as a computer, and finally make it a requirement that you can run your own code on computers. Of course, carrots are better than sticks, so maybe put a tax on all non-computer electronics, and a rebate for computers. All just to be able to run my own code on an ipad. Which, you can actually do with Pythonista. There's a small ecosystem of apps using that, as well as the official Shortcuts app, which I'd call programming. it's not Xcode on an iPad (though I'm sure there's a lucky engineer at Apple that has one that can do that, but then doesn't get to have any fun with it), and it's not really close either.
Who is "we"? Apparently not enough people want this.
> I can't buy a new car that I can register without seatbelts, so the concept of making things illegal to buy is not entirely foreign.
That's a strawman argument. Not having cars without seatbelts has safety implications. A better analogy would be cars which don't allow you to replace the built-in car stereo for example.
> so maybe put a tax on all non-computer electronics, and a rebate for computers. All just to be able to run my own code on an ipad. Which, you can actually do with Pythonista.
Then maybe we should also have a tax for computers that run Python, because it's so energy inefficient. Only make the ones tax-free that only allow C++ and assembly language.
Everybody who wants Xcode on iPads to happen. If you do not want such a thing, I am not talking for you. There may be dozens of us and we don't have the political clout to make it happen, but maybe we can agree that something has been lost here.
Is it still a straw man argument when I explicitly point out that I know it's not the same thing, twice, with the phrases "while the reasoning is different" and "Of course, those are for safety"?
As far as taxing Python for energy inefficiency goes, If it means violating Wirth's Law, I can't say that I'd be entirely against it in the hypothetical because we both know that's never going to happen. It takes longer to open some apps on my iPhone that's a million times faster (though, to be fair, also does a million more things) than it took to open vi on a Linux box in console mode (no X) in the previous century.
I get your point, especially given the enormous power of the hardware and capabilities, but there is no surprise here: their hardware, their software, and you know what you are buying (it's not like it was open then it was remotely locked down) so everyone agreed at the time of purchase.
Anything can be made illegal. I agree it's tricky to create a general rule here. My suggestion would be to require bootloaders to be unlocked such that custom operating systems can be installed on it (and yes this could apply to smart TVs, games consoles, etc too).
That wouldn't get it us macOS, but it would get us Linux and incentivise Apple to provide macOS too.
My fear is that such a regulation would end up being a net negative for the consumer. Apple would protect MacBook sales in other ways, e.g. crippling iPad hardware. Genuine question: if it was a net negative, would that still be worth it in your eyes?
Companies should be able to make whatever device they want. I use iPhone/iPad when I want to be fairly confident that nobody's actively screenshotting my every move.
The more doors you open intentionally, the more doors become open unintentionally.
If I wanted a device that allows installation of any OS, I would buy one.
Companies like “Honor” are already doing a good job of cloning Apple’s UX. Go right ahead… nobody’s stopping manufacturers from making fully hackable phones.
So should it also be illegal for game consoles not to run a general purpose OS? The Apple displays also run a version of iOS, should it also be illegal for them not to run full versions of iOS?
I have some sympathy for the argument about side loading, the inability to have alternate app stores etc and the things that the EU is addressing haphardly.
But saying the government should mandate that Apple must support MacOS on iPads is a bridge too far.
> Every time I see something like this, I'm a bit sad, that we live in a world where tablets (especially iPad M4) have comparable performance to most laptops, but we still cannot run a general purpose OS (macOS/Linux/Windows) on them.
Many devs are also to blame, there are enough hybrid laptops around to pick from, so basically they are voting with their wallet validating that this kind of workarounds are acceptable.
Or even smartphone-sized devices (not saying "smartphone" because of the expectations for those in terms of battery life and telephony). With keyboard in my backpack I could have a legit pocket-size general purpose computer.
I am keeping an eye on Starlabs new intel-based linux tablet [1], I am curious what the reviews will be like once it finally ships.
The iPhone 15 pro could be a general purpose computer, but Apple doesn’t want that.
Imagine plugging your phone into a Lightning dock and then it is running full macOS or Ubuntu in a vm, with Bluetooth keyboard and mouse support.
This is possible from a hardware perspective (look at Samsung dex), and would actually bring innovation to the smartphone market, but we allow Apple/google/friends to lock down our hardware bc of profits.
It boggles my mind that Apple don't release an iPad that runs macOS. It would sell like hotcakes. And with the M series chips they have already developed the technology to have multiple securely segregated OS's on the same device (so they could have it run iPad OS too if they wanted to).
The answer seems obvious to me, ipad running macos would then compete with the mac. It’s the same reason apple does not release a laptop with a touch screen.
This is baloney. Here's a literal quote from their iPad Air "Why iPad" [0] page, "iPad is so versatile, it’s more than up to any task." They market them as do anything devices with art as a option. Hell that same page even talks about building your coding skills in Swift Playground although who knows what you're supposed to do when you advance beyond that level? I guess in Apple's mind buy a Mac?
Not in the App Store, and I believe on recent iOS versions not even with reasonable performance (due to a lack of JIT and/or hardware virtualization support, I believe).
Even if it’s possible, the point is that iPad OS really feels like it’s intentionally holding back the power user experience for the sake of being more accessible to new users in a way that e.g. macOS doesn’t.
From what I understand it is in AltStore which is installable without another device in UE and still installable running AltServer on a separate computer.
Annoying I understand. But fairly easy to anyone motivated to get it.
As for the performance they say:
"The lack of hardware virtualization on Apple A-chips means that even for ARM code we must re-compile it with JIT. Therefore performance would never reach the levels possible with KVM. There is also no support for GPU virtualization so that means no DirectX or OpenGL. This makes most modern games non-playable."
I guess it would be at least good enough to run an IDE, git and have terminal access provided any serious compilation is done remotely and not locally. And might even be good enough to run some lightweight containers.
EDIT: seeing that on ios 14 devices it needs to be jailbroken, so I guess it is best used on "obsolete" models.
The Altstore they are referring to is the sideload version, not the EU store that was just released. This requires a computer to install the IPA file. Once you install UTM using this sideloading method the only way to activate JIT to make UTM useable in any meaningful way is to be on the same local network as a computer with SideJitServer installed and running. Then you can use an emulated OS and drain your battery super fast.
Long story short UTM is not currently a solution. Apple either needs to allow JIT for all apps or SideJitServer needs to do the impossible and figure out a way to activate over a remote connection.
I guess with the dell xps 13 having tandem oled now, this might arrive eventually. However, right now the screens are big differentiators between the ipad pro and macbook air.
There's an excellent app called iSH which runs Alpine Linux on iOS. I wish it were possible to boot into iSH on the iPad