Print and scan

I was actually expecting this to be a lot more difficult too, but in reality, it was pretty straight forward.  I have an Epson WorkForce WF-3640 in my home office, and in any of my Linux VMs I’ve never been able to connect to it, even though it’s physically connected to my LAN and accessible over WiFi.

It wasn’t a major problem as I rarely need to print anything from a VM, and when I do I can actually send it to an Epson Connect e-mail address which sends it directly my printer and prints it out.  The wonders of modern technology!

Adding a printer is pretty much the same in eOS as it is any other OS, but the WF-3640 isn’t listed in the longest list of Epson printers I think I’ve ever seen.  Off to the Epson website and a search found me a number of .deb files.

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Locked out

No, I haven’t screwed things up just yet, but in trying to connect to all my devices I realised just how ‘locked out’ of just about everything I’d be (both locally and online) without access to 1Password!

I’ve been listening to all the scary cyber security stories, and whilst I’ll admit that many years ago I probably used 2-3 passwords for just about everything, I’ve been using 1Password for quite a long time now and almost every password I use is unique and relatively complex.  Where possible, I’m also using 2-Factor Authentication (2FA)  which makes me feel a little more secure but also raises the issue of what would happen if I couldn’t access 1Password.

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Networking

Why is this always so difficult?  Surely it should be a simple in this connected world for devices to talk with each other without jumping through various hoops?

Playing with FreeNAS has developed my network understanding, but I’m still very much an amateur when it comes to fully understanding my ‘network stack’  I need to figure out the best way to talk to the various devices I have using a combination of sharing protocols (e.g. CIFS, AFP, NFS)

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Touch me touch me, say that you love me

Right, now I’ve got my preferred browser, I’d like to sort out some gestures.  To be fair, 2-finger gestures seem to be working pretty well ‘out of the box’ or at least I can scroll up and down.

In macOS I use 3-finger swipes to so 2 really common things:

  1.  3-fingers left and right go backwards and forward in the browser, and make jumping in and out of pages so simple
  2. 3-fingers up and down switch between desktops, which I use a lot as I like to have different things running on different desktops, more often than not full screen

If I can get this sorted, everything will feel a lot more like macOS.

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Google

I’ll digress a little here, but what did we do before the world wide web, and more specifically Google?

Yes, I hear all the anti-Google arguments, but they don’t charge me anything and the convenience and access to knowledge they provide is a price I’m willing to pay.  I’ve not really hunted around for alternatives, as I’m pretty sure I’ve found the best.

I remember using Yahoo and Netscape in the early days, but where are they now?  I’m actually forced to use Bing on a clients laptop I’m currently using, and even that doesn’t work quite as accurately as Google.

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Where to begin?

Another great question!  I guess my aim is to see if I could live in eOS should there come a time when I feel the need to ditch macOS.

I’m not going to get into the applications too much in the post and will save that for later when I have a nice and stable system that’s doing most of what I want.  Needless to say, I know I’m not going to get some software that runs permanently on my Mac, but I know of alternatives for some (e.g. MS Office) and will be interested to see if new ones exist for others (e.g OmniFocus – I’d really really miss that!)

One of the reasons I love macOS so much is the interaction with the enormous trackpad.  If you’ve never used an Apple trackpad you don’t know what you’re missing.  If you have, you know what I mean.  Using 2, 3 and 4 finger gestures is something I’d really miss and I’m going to try and tackle this early on.  It’s one of the things that might have broken the 1st (undocumented) attempt, so I don’t want to get too far in only to find I break ‘take 2’

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