Comment by jamesjguthrie
5 years ago
Through that website I found the iSH app and it’s amazing. It’s an Alpine Linux shell in an x86 emulator and it’s on the App Store.
I just installed gcc, Java, and Python on my iPad Pro. I can also install Ruby, PHP, etc. I can do most of my work now from my iPad without using Remote Desktop. Game changer. This app should be included on iPad Pro by default.
It’s nice to have. As said in previous comments regarding ish releases, from TestFlight beta to the AppStore, it’s pretty slow compared to something more "native" like termed on android.
I love that it can access files (your iCloud files for instance) from the system but mounting them within "Linux" with a simple "mount -t ios . /mnt". The other way is also possible, accessing is files from the files app.
iSH is very good, and it is Alpine, but it's not _quite_ Linux, if I understand correctly. Note that the output of `uname -a` reports a kernel version of `4.20.69-ish`.
It reimplements system calls at the moment; you can consider it to be similar to Wine or WSL1.
Is that a real version number or just a week+sex number joke?
It’s a highly nice number.
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iSH is amazing, but in practice most things don't work.
Try doing a git clone of a large project, it takes forever and the phone gets uncomfortably hot. Also if you don't keep the phone from locking you will have to restart the (possibly 20-30 minute long) process. You can do this by turning on location tracking (this is something apple mandated) which probably turns on the GPS RF amplifier and is one of the fastest ways to drain the battery. I've had the phone shut down while charging leaving the GPS running with another CPU intensive app before (Spotify I think.)
But on the iPad this is just about the only choice.