Tom Ballard gets Omarchy running on an 11-year-old iPad mini 4
Eleven days after a bare Linux shell, Tom Ballard’s iPad mini 4 is running the touch Omarchy desktop from the Orchard project. It still boots over USB, and nothing has been merged yet.
Image: Tom Ballard (@tcballard on X)
The list of iPads running Omarchy keeps growing. On November 2, 2026, Tom Ballard posted a photo on X with a simple announcement: “ladies and gents, we did it – Omarchy on the iPad Mini 4!!” Apple released that tablet on September 9, 2015, so this is Omarchy on an 11-year-old device powered by the A8 chip.
It did not come out of nowhere. On October 22, Tom reported that his iPad mini 4 was running native ARM64 Linux with “Both A8 cores online” and a live root shell, and closed with “Next stop: Omarchy.” We mentioned it at the time in our story on Henrik Klee’s iPad 6 work. Eleven days later, he got there.
Henrik gets the credit in Tom’s post, “for accelerating the journey.” Asked how he got Claude to help, Tom said to ask it to map drivers “and build off the orchard repo by @henrikklee,” the OrchardLinux project behind Omarchy A, and that without Henrik’s help it “would have taken me another month!” The same caveat applies as for the iPad 6: this is a community, Omarchy-inspired touch desktop, not an official Omarchy release.
Tom also credits his tooling. “And my god, switching from Codex to Claude made it 10x easier,” he wrote. Asked what Claude was actually better at, he answered: “Kernel and driver :)”
Now for the limits. Asked whether the install survives a reboot or needs a tethered USB boot every time, Tom replied: “USB still. But getting there.” On graphics, Henrik answered a question about conformant Vulkan drivers with “Not fully conformat yet,” pointing to his GPU work on the iPad 6’s A10, a different chip from the mini 4’s A8. And for anyone eyeing a newer tablet, Henrik noted that the approach only works “up to A11 (checkm8 exploit),” that cellular is “not tested,” and that the install is reversible.
Can you install it on your own iPad mini 4 today? Not yet. Tom’s post ends with “now to get this merged upstream!”, but as of November 3 there is no iPad mini 4 pull request on the OrchardLinux repositories, and the Omarchy A README still lists the iPad 6 Wi-Fi as the only supported device.
Next on Tom’s list is the touch experience. The work is “drivers for now,” he said, “but I’ll be making touch-focused plugins for it.”
DHH quote-posted the announcement the same day with a bigger picture in mind: “Omarchy everywhere! Tablets, TVs, computers. We can fix everything.“
