> I mean, at that point it's no better than a microcontroller. Agreed, but what's the state of the art for the alternatives? Android has Termux, which is basic

> I mean, at that point it's no better than a microcontroller. Agreed, but what's the state of the art for the alternatives? Android has Termux, which is basically a Debian chroot - can you get it to talk to the rest of the OS sensibly? Can you write a shell script to act on an incoming SMS[1]? Can you run Android Studio on Android? What about the base system - can it be made self-hosting? SailfishOS is dead - I take my Jolla out of the drawer once a year to check how many kernel or Firefox releases they're lagging behind. Does PostmarketOS have at least one device where all hardware is supported? Meanwhile yes, all options for the iPad are either Apple-sanctioned or - as TFA shows - pure homebrew. This is not a PC, but neither is any of the alternatives. However the sanctioned options are relatively decent from the "getting stuff done" PoV: Shortcuts is basically shell scripts with a GUI; Playgrounds[2] can build native iPad apps. It's not freedom by any definition, but you can't call it a microcontroller. You could argue a shell would be more practical than Shortcuts... But iSH[3] exists. [1]: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/shortcuts/apdd711f9dff/5.0/ios/15.0 https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/shortcuts/apdd711f9dff... [2]: https://apps.apple.com/app/id908519492 https://apps.apple.com/app/id908519492 [3]: https://apps.apple.com/app/id1436902243 https://apps.apple.com/app/id1436902243 > But running recent bash is a requirement for maintaining servers, cross-platform *NIX development and a huge number of toolchains. Interesting, I guess YMMV again. I have the stock, ancient Bash on my Mac, and no Bash at all on my OpenBSD box. But I can easily imagine some random toolchain having a 10000-line Bash monster as a launcher/updater, I was probably lucky so far. > I would have preferred an "it just works" solution, but I'm sure that's the answer most Mac users would issue me so I'll take it. Take it from a BSD user then ;)