Due to COVID, I am stuck in a weird location, with an old laptop, unstable housing and no wired Internet connection.
At work, I have a really powerful Linux workstation which I can SSH to. Hence, I can run Emacs and shells remotely and multiplex them in a single terminal window using GNU Screen.
Are iPads ready as development machines, if one sticks to SSH and a local browser? Alternatively, what other simple, inexpensive and light machines are suitable for this purpose?
I have done some research, and there are some good clients around like Blink. Furthermore, the new Magic keyboard with an integrated trackpad seems to position iPads as relatively direct competition for netbooks. Some glitches and roadblocks are concerning, like the lack of dedicated ESC key or issues with SSH background connections.
Chromebooks are sadly not a good alternative anymore unless you are comfortable logging to Google services for everything. This is a big privacy concern for me. Hardware is great and inexpensive on some models like the Pixelbook Go, but it's not easy to wipe out ChromeOS to run pure Linux.
What other options are worth considering? Perhaps Surface devices or cheap Thinkpads? Some other ARM devices like the Pinebook are very appealing, but not easy to purchase quickly.
The author was using his iPad as an SSH dev machine even way back then. These days I find it even easier since the iPad can now fully support AWS Cloud9 and also VSCode remote workspaces, so you can do graphical IDEs as well. If you’re going to be developing remotely there’s no reason an iPad wouldn’t work well for you.