[lykr0n]

I highly doubt that you're going to get a proper shell on the iPad.

[derefr]

I'm assuming you mean a shell into the iPad's own Unix environment. You could build something for iOS that works like Crouton does on ChromeOS just fine. (Just, nobody has done it yet, for some reason. The iPad Pro is plenty powerful enough to run VMs!)

[matthewbauer]

I don't think it's as easy as crouton. There's no chroot or user namespace equivalent for XNU.

[saagarjha]

iSH does this by emulating Linux rather than virtualizing it.

[BlackRing]

Both Pythonista and OpenTerm on iOS are "good enough" for a lot of what I need, but it would be nice to have a proper shell. Even if it's jailed/locked to /private/var/mobile