Go read this excellent piece by Watts Martin about his successes, failures, and struggles while using an iPad Pro as his primary mobile computer.

What’s interesting is his argument that folks who are trying to go iOS primary (or at least iOS when mobile) are doing it because of the challenge. That resonates with my experience on iOS and Linux.

Eye-grabbing headline comparisons aside, he illuminates why using iOS is such a challenge and it comes as no real surprise: continued difficulties with the iOS inter-app communication paradigm and the OS-wide lack of a multi-app file concept. This could of course be solved by a computer-like traditional file system. While there are reasonable objections to taking that path, it seems difficult to argue that the current solution is somehow better than a traditional file system.

Third-parties are making great strides on the workaround front. With the latest update to Textastic, you can now navigate and edit an entire Git repository’s folder structure in place via Working Copy. Dropbox continues to be the file system for a file-systemless OS. Workflow is essential. That kind of third-party effort is great, and much of it is even enabled by OS-level tools, like the iCloud document picker.

But why should my Git repository be owned by Working Copy in the first place? I’m with Watts on this one:

You can argue that I should just stay within the bounds of the ecosystem I’m supposed to be in. Fuck that. This is plain text.

Struggles aside, it’s getting close enough that I’m now iPad primary for everything but website creation (most fixes and tweaks are manageable though), page layout, and vector-based graphic design.

That’s a surprisingly large subset of my computing experience, and it’s a lot closer than I ever thought we’d be. There’s still a long way to go.