LinPad puts Firefox, VS Code and VLC in iPad windows, with no VM and no jailbreak

“A powerful machine that ends up as a Netflix screen.” That’s how Vali Neagu’s GitHub README sums up the iPad Air M3 he develops on, and LinPad OS is his fix for it.

Open LinPad like any other iPad app and you get a Linux desktop: windows you move and tile, workspaces, a Store, a shell with apk. The README lists “Firefox, VS Code, Thunar, VLC, Node, git, Claude Code — running on the iPad itself,” and promises “No VM. No jailbreak. One app.”

The trick sits under the hood. Per the FAQ, LinPad “runs Linux programs directly inside one iPad app by translating their Linux system calls to iPadOS, building on iSH. There is no guest kernel and no hypervisor.” It’s a fork of iSH by way of iSH-ARM64, with a native ARM64 JIT added.

Linux windows reach the iPad through ishwl, “a small Wayland compositor inside Linux” that shares each window’s pixels through memory-mapped files. Graphics run through virglrenderer’s Venus renderer on MoltenVK and Metal, which is how Linux Vulkan and OpenGL ES land on the Apple GPU. A SwiftUI shell called DesktopKit manages native and Linux windows as one desktop.

Version 1.5.0 is a 637 MB IPA on the download page, “Free, for iPads with an M1 chip or newer,” on iPadOS 17 or later. The catalog has 803 apps, and 67 of them are marked “works well.” The rest are marked untested.

Battery life is the open number. The FAQ says it’s “Not measured yet, and we would rather publish a real number than guess,” with device measurements promised for v1.0.

Why it matters

Apple’s own rule decides the speed. “iPadOS only allows that while a debugger is attached,” the FAQ says of the JIT, so LinPad hands off to StikDebug for fast mode. Without it, everything runs on an interpreter, and the JIT measured “about 4.8× on a Mac.” The FAQ says iPad figures aren’t measured yet.

The same rule keeps it off the App Store. LinPad “generates native code (the JIT) and downloads executable software, which App Store rules do not allow,” so you sideload it with your own Apple ID, “like UTM and other developer tools.” On a free Apple ID, apps “expire after 7 days and need a refresh.”

The limits come from the approach. There’s no Docker, because it “needs Linux namespaces, cgroups and overlayfs, which a usermode Linux on iPadOS does not have.” “Steam, Proton and modern games are not realistic.” iPadOS suspends background apps, so an npm install pauses when you switch away, and VS Code wants 8 GB of memory or more.

One developer built it. The download page calls LinPad “pre-release software made by one developer.” Neagu (@AmbsdOP on X) writes on his about page that it started with a music-model project he wanted on his iPad, and that he kept “running into restrictions when I wanted to do development work.”

The README’s complaint is with the software, not the chip: “No real terminal. No VS Code. No Linux tools.” LinPad uses the door Apple already leaves open for developers, sideloading plus a debugger-attached JIT, and runs a whole Linux userland through it.

That puts the project’s future in Apple’s hands as much as Neagu’s. If StikDebug’s route to JIT keeps working, the next numbers to watch are the ones the FAQ says aren’t in yet: iPad speed and battery drain, due with v1.0. If those land close to native, the next question is how many of the 736 untested apps turn into “works well.”

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