Magic Mouse and Magic Keyboard working in Omarchy for iPad Could an old iPad become a pocket desktop?

the iPad was ready for retirement and you gave it a terminal

not so fast!

@omarchy I'd love to do this. I have 2 Gen 1 iPads, bought on day 1. They've been sitting on a shelf unused for years since Apple stopped supporting updates. My only problem is finding the USB charger & cable.

@omarchy Seems like that could be solved

@omarchy Right, in my copious spare time.... 😂

@omarchy This is wild.

@omarchy It looks like you’ve opted to not use tiling windows. I was wondering how hyprland would work on an iPad without a keyboard.

@omarchy There must be a good solution somewhere for tiling with gestures and visual feedback

@omarchy This guy who made this fractal window manager for MacOS had some really interesting ideas.

@dhh @omarchy Just give me a beautiful transition from Touch to Desktop mode and I’m sold.

@dhh @omarchy What would you expect from touch mode and from the transition?

@omarchy now you are going all in bro.

@omarchy Works only on m series chip?

@omarchy No known exploit for M chips yet

@omarchy I want this on my old iPad mini so bad

@omarchy what model / year?

@gill_kyle @omarchy i have a gen 1, so 2012-ish? same boat. killer device with great battery and a sick leather folio. would love to turn it into a pure reading device.

@henrikklee @gill_kyle @omarchy Let it rest. 🥀 That thing belongs in museum with less than 1GB of ram. I know I had one in my drawer Even lowest end Amazon tablet outperforms it by miles

@henrikklee @gill_kyle @omarchy it's actually a gen 2 and i got curious after this. wiped it and Claude Code and I got it running with some real IPAs of Libby and Kindle and updated with some new root certs. works nicely!

no way! totally digging into this as a weekend project now

nice! yep already glad i spent the time figuring it out. i had Claude make an rundown for you:

Amazing 🥹 I am going to hand these off to my Claude who I'm sure will be more than happy to assist haha Will report back!

@dhh @omarchy how to make it possible？

@dhh @omarchy

@omarchy Asi vím co udělám s iPadem Pro 13" první generace 😄

@omarchy awesome, let me know how it goes

@omarchy Old iPad as a pocket desktop? Mine already is. Second-hand, running CPython + pip, Node + npm and Clang locally, AI agent included, zero servers. Respect for getting Omarchy on there though, that port is wild.

@dhh @omarchy Hardware will continue to be liberated until morale improves.

@omarchy If only it was the M2 version... Would be wild !

@omarchy so the real question is whether the iPad can actually *run* desktop apps or just mirror—if it can’t open the actual macos tools, it’s just a glorified input slab, not a pocket desktop

@omarchy It's not running macos but it can for sure run the linux apps

@omarchy Love the spare-iPad reuse angle. When I’m not running a full desktop on it, I leave an old iPad as a calm desk clock for US East / West / UK offices. Needless Clock (free, no ads/tracking):

@omarchy Which version of iPad?

@omarchy 6th gen wifi

@dhh @omarchy No! It sucks for productivity. The end.

@omarchy Are there any instructions for an iPad Air 1st gen?

@dhh @omarchy How? Is a gen 2 iPad Pro able to get @omarchy running?

@dhh @omarchy

@dhh @omarchy Awesome, thanks man

@omarchy That’s awesome would this run on m series iPads?

@omarchy 🔥🔥🔥

@omarchy Yes, i ran debian xfce on my ipad 7 once in a vm it was slow but it worked

@omarchy Omarchy taking over devices reminds me of the Star Trek "Trouble With Tribbles" episode... except the end state is awesome!

@omarchy Omarchy is legendary!

@omarchy anyway of doing this to an old iPad 2?

@omarchy I guess the big blocker for now remains the GPU drivers, which seems close to impossible to get sorted?

@omarchy there's a PowerVR mesa driver for similar devices so it's not totally from zero

@omarchy

@omarchy Which on screen keyboard did you use? Mine? Mine also has gamepad control (nice for big screens) Repo here:

@omarchy Did you figure out how to show it automatically when needed?

@omarchy I solved that by doing a button up swipe to toggle the OSK.

@omarchy I used a Hyprland plugin to detect that gesture, for labwc you would probably have to figure something else out.

@omarchy The magic in hyprland for the up-swipe is: action = hl.dsp.exec_cmd(os.getenv("HOME") .. "/.config/hypr/scripts/osk-toggle.sh"), If labwc can do gestures, that's the toggle.

@omarchy Nice, a gesture seems better than a button

I used a script here to debounce things, as some gesture support likes to double-fire events (like hyprgrass likes to do). It should be easy to adapt to another compositor, the hyprland configs used are pretty straightforward to grok. If you do have a complete labwc solution, let me know. I could add support for it out of the box.

@omarchy will let you know! currently working on the install + bring up process more to enable more people on their devices and show what's possible, when i get back to shell dev will keep that in mind

@dhh @omarchy No shit! Can I run it on my iPad Pro I never use for anything these days?

@dhh @omarchy Yes, please!

@omarchy Does vncviewer work on it? If so I have to see if my iPad is supported. That is my freakin dream right there for my home lab

@omarchy i will test but i don't see why not. youtube playback is working so vnc should be as well

@omarchy Amazing.

@omarchy Looking good @henrikklee im back at driver building again, Lets get this done :)

@omarchy Yes, easily. Old hardware with a real desktop setup beats buying new gear for simple work.

@omarchy ❤️