Using Linux At Work - Part 2 - Collaborating with people on other OSes
1,872In this second part of my Linux at work series, we’ll go over how I managed to work with others in my company. Everyone there, apart from the developers, uses OS X, and Macs, so interacting with them might have been an issue.
Set up your own Linux server with LINODE : http://www.linode.com/linuxexperiment(USE OFFER CODE LINUXEXP19)
Support the channel on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thelinuxexperiment
Follow me on Twitter : http://twitter.com/thelinuxEXP
What I use to make my videos:
Microphone: https://amzn.to/2PsNWXl
GPU: https://amzn.to/2LHZ5o5
Motherboard: https://amzn.to/2KZt63t
CPU: https://amzn.to/2IFjKrw
We use a zimbra based solution, which interfaces nicely with the elementary OS calendar and email apps through caldav / IMAP. The elementary OS calendar does take some time to show up appointments, and some recurrent appointments don’t seem to show up at all though, which prompts me to open the zimbra web app from time to time just to check.The default email app also doesn’t support email signatures, so I can’t add my own, and I also can’t create folders or labels, so it’s not optimal yet.
The main issue here, is that the contacts directory of our Zimbra server doesn’t seem to be exposed to elementary’s calendar, so, creating appointments, I need to type everyone’s email address manually.We also use Slack, Asana, and GitLab. All are available on the web, and as such, I use them in Firefox directly. I tried the slack app, but it’s just an electron wrapper, and uses tons of resources, so I uninstalled it, and kept a pinned tab in my browser instead, with notifications enabled.
I also tried to create webapps with epiphany for these various applications, but in the end, I found using them in the browser was much easier than to switch windows all the time, and less distracting as well.Generally, I tried to use Epiphany at work, but it’s just not well suited to my job: I need to test our website and web app on browsers most people use, so Firefox and Chrome are the main tools I need.
We exchange two kinds of documents; iWork documents, since everyone uses Macs, and Office documents. Our Office documents are perfectly editable in LibreOffice, without issues. I could even modify PDFs using LibreOffice Draw, which is great. Excel spreadsheets and word documents open nicely and work great. If I run into an issue LibreOffice can’t handle, I also use WPS Office, which has better compatibility.For iWork documents, I don’t have a native app solution.
No office suite I know of can open them, so I resort to using the online iCLoud.com portal, and open these documents there. It’s not ideal, and some features are missing, but most of the time, the edits I make are minor, so it’s not a big deal.Images, PDFs, and other kinds of documents, I can handle nicely using the default elementary OS tools. I don’t receive or work with any esoteric file formats, so my needs are pretty well covered.
Our Brother printer is available on the network, and is detected automatically, and easy to configure and use. We also had a smaller HP colorjet printer, which didn’t show up in the list of networked printers at all. Using its IP address, I could get it to setup, but not to print, over https, or http. I ended up having to go and plug the laptop through USB to print my single page document. It’s no big deal, since I have the bigger Brother printer set up, but it’s farther away from my desk, so not as convenient.The printer interface on elementary OS is not that easy to use, and not that legible, especially when trying to add a printer through HTTP.
In my personal life, I have zero use for a printer, but for people working in an office, it can be a pretty critical tool, and making their installation and configuration easy should be a focus to ensure anyone can use any distro at work comfortably.
Now, after about a month of using elementary OS at work, I faced a few hiccups in the workflow, notably in how to work with multiple monitors. First, the dock only appears on the primary display. So either you resort to alt Tab, which I find super inefficient since you never know which app is open where, or you move your mouse to the primary display, make the dock appear, and select the app to open. I’d rather have the dock show up on both monitors, with an option to only show applications open of each monitor.
The alt tab switcher in elementary OS seems a bit weird as well: it only cycles between windows on the current virtual desktop, so if you need to switch to an app open on a second desktop, you need to use the dock, or cycle through the workspaces until you find the one you need.elementary OS also lacks a “show desktop” keyboard shortcut, to minimize everything at once. It’s sometimes useful to directly hide all windows to just open the one you want, and by default, it’s not feasible. You can, however, control + right click on the dock to open its hidden preferences, and add a docklet to show the desktop.