Re: Enterprise Guix Hosting?

["Ludovic Courtès" <ludo@gnu.org>]

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’.