On some projects, I'm using same thing (serial to ethernet). Serial can be RS232 or RS485 ... in my case it's also 485.
For me installing third party is also something what I would like to avoid. And only way to do that is wrote yourself virtual serial port software inside your application. To be able to do that, you need to know in detail protocol specification of manufacturer of 485/Ethernet which you are using. One which I use, protocol is not documented publicly so I (for now) decided to not do it.
Solution (or way) which I will probably go is to do RS485/ethernet by myself. You can think also of that way.
With B4X set of tools, you can do it with B4R on ESP32 ... then you would have RS485/WiFi with known protocol which you can simply use from your applications on desktop or mobile phones (and good is all programmed and code shared with B4X set of tools).