I'm trying to connect a university ipad (air, usb 3 type c, not tb or lightning) to my laptop (Framework laptop, intel 12th gen) running Fedora workstation 39. On Windows, I used a nifty app called Duet Display. I just used a usb-c cable to plug the ipad into the laptop, launched the app on both devices, and windows would see an external monitor. Scaling and resolution worked fine, and latency wasn't perfect, but was more than enough for a secondary display. With settings tweaked, artifacting was minimal.
I know there are remote desktop protocols and apps, but I really want to avoid a wireless connection. Remote desktop over the internet is wasteful and unreliable, and as for local network, ,my university has some strict controls on its wifi network and I cannot reliably connect my devices. Even if I could, the reliability and latency are still bad.
Duet over usb always worked and didn't rely on a wireless connection, but it also is closed source and windows and mac only.
From what I can see online, the best way for an ipad to display content from another device is going to be a remote desktop protocol as it does not directly accept video signals like HDMI-in. The ipad can also connect to a network over usb c/ethernet.
It seems the best approach would be to create a local network on my PC and connect my ipad to it with the cable, and then use a remote desktop client on the ipad.
Is this a good approach? If so, how exactly would I make the usb connection share a local network connection?
Note I only want to connect the ipad to the laptop. I understand if the ipad will not connect to wifi while connected to ethernet, and I don't need to share the internet connection with the ipad. My computer still needs to be connected to wifi/ethernet to access my university network, however.
I've been looking for this too. Even a decent remote desktop for the iPad/Linux.
I think the app shouldn't be an issue. Plenty of clients, either on web or for rdp or vnc. My main struggle is the connection.
Does your iPad support usb 2 (lightning), usb 3 or thunderbolt?
USB 3
If USB is a must, you may be able to work something up from the packages here: https://libimobiledevice.org/ . iPhones with hotspot enabled will show up as a standard ethernet device (with iphone acting as router) with usbmuxd/libusbmuxd installed. I don’t know if this would work exactly the same on an iPad but you may be able to use the above router suggestion (or possibly with the iPad acting as the router) with a USB cable if it does.