Long story short, I don’t have the resources to keep any PC on for a reasonable time, so I want to make use of all the hardware I can find, I have an old iPad 4th generation lying around, I know anything related to programming becomes annoying when using a touchscreen but it’s what I got, I don’t mind jailbreaking it, or even have a Linux distro that actually works on (I’m fine with compiling stuff myself too)
I don’t use Visual Studio Code, so please don’t take this as endorsement, but this article reminded me of your post:
Google’s project idx might work for you, https://idx.dev/ it can pull from GitHub and run an instance of vs code and a terminal in the browser. It’s not the fastest, but I’ve been using it to do some dev work with my iPad on an Astro project I have
I have been hoping someone would eventually write a solid utility to use old tablets as touch screen displays for other machines but I think the apple ecosystem has prevented any good solutions from being banged out.
There are no “real” alternative OS available for apple devices. You can get some IDE “lite” apps like Visual Code, Python Editor, etc. but these a meant as companions to a PC IDE not meant for compiling, linking, testing, etc. You might be able to trade the old iPad for an old laptop you can put a flavor of Linux on.
You absolutely want a keyboard when programming, but you can get one that works with the ipad. As someone else suggested the software environment is probably more the limiting factor.
