Re: Enterprise Guix Hosting?

[Yasuaki Kudo <yasu@yasuaki.com>]

Let's do this!  My partners and I are fired up about the idea and we would like this to be developed, along the way we continue to serve customers (or co-creators, in our worker coop world😄).

Realistic, step by step implementation, niche to niche, until we make it big! 😄

-Yasu

> On Aug 10, 2022, at 05:37, Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> wrote:
> 
> Hi Phil,
> 
> Phil <phil@beadling.co.uk> skribis:
> 
>> My own experience is that whilst it doesn't require a PhD to setup Guix
>> for the enterprise, it is a non-trivial journey, and it does require
>> a fair amount of time and effort to create something that regular
>> developers/scientists (i.e. non-Guix converts who just want to get on with their
>> day-jobs) accept is as good or better than regular tooling they are used
>> to.  There's certainly a barrier to entry for people who don't want to
>> do a deep-dive and just want tooling to support them in their professional
>> role, without them having to think about it too much.
>> 
>> Upselling the real benefits of Guix like rollbacks, profiles, perfectly
>> reproducable builds, swapping one dependency for another - even in a
>> scientific/tech-savvy company with lots of PhDs took a bit of persuading
>> from me. Even now I think our company is only using perhaps 30% of the
>> true power of Guix.  Making all that power accessible to people who just
>> want to get on with their jobs in an easy, intuitive way is a challenge
>> I'm continuously trying to address.  I also hope things like PantherX
>> might help bridge the gap in the near future! 
> 
> From your experience, would you say that persuading was hard primarily
> because Guix was unknown (to them), or because getting started is
> difficult?
> 
> Personally I think we need to make Guix approachable to a wide audience,
> meaning not just developers—that goes beyond your target audience, let’s
> be ambitious!  I’d like to think that ‘guix install’, ‘guix shell’, and
> the likes have a rather low barrier to entry to someone who’s use the
> command line before, but I’ve also seen newcomers confused because
> “environment variables are hard” and get in the way.
> 
> Are there any takeaways from your experience in terms of UX/UI
> improvements we could work on?
> 
> Thanks,
> Ludo’.