In Federico Viticci’s excellent long-form blog post about the iPad Pro as a modular computer is this section about accessing his Mac (a Mac Mini):
With my Mac mini running in the background, I can open Screens on the iPad Pro, which instantly logs me into macOS with my credentials. Here’s why this setup is incredible: Screens for iPad supports full-screen output on external displays (more in the next section), which means I can interact with a full-screen macOS UI on the UltraFine display that is actually being transmitted from an iPad app over USB-C. In the latest version of Screens for iPad, I can use the Magic Trackpad to click-and-drag macOS windows, right-click to open contextual menus, and otherwise use the native macOS pointer from my iPad without even seeing the iPadOS pointer on my external display. It’s a mind-bending setup, but it works beautifully – you’d be forgiven if you looked at the photo below and thought I was using macOS and the iPad Pro next to each other. In reality, that’s just my iPad Pro running Screens in external display mode along with a Magic Trackpad 2… Effectively, this is macOS as an app.
– Modular Computer: iPad Pro as a Tablet, Laptop, and Desktop Workstation
This is fantastic. And a great way of putting it. The iPad Pro’s performance makes it possible to interact with a remote machine – graphically. And the software support both within the Screens app and now within iOS 13 make it possible to emulate Mac OS gestures via inputs connected to the iPad Pro.
My needs don’t require a full-fledged Mac OS desktop, but I do require a UNIX setup occasionally. In that case I use the excellent Termius app to SSH into my Raspberry Pi that I have physically attached to my router and mainly runs Pi-hole.
Termius has a built-in SFTP client, but I’m not sure I want to run an FTP server on the Pi. So I use Resilio Sync to transfer any files to/from the iPad. This works for the most part – Resilio Sync on the iPad even has a file provider so it shows up as a destination in Files and file browsers views, but the app needs to be open to actually sync. I can live with it, but it’s suboptimal, especially when transferring large files.