Another marketing meeting went down, we are slowly getting around how to talk about certain stuff, there is room for many improvements, but I’m very excited with the direction we are going.
Governance page is going to be merged soon, everybody will do review as soon as possible.
Landing page
Nix and NixOS about pages are going to be partially merged into landing page, while we will still have a sub-page where we will explain more in depth about pros and cons of nix/nixos.
We also discussed what is the audience we should be targeting. In-short: Developers and DevOps, but please listen to the video for full context
List short interesting examples that show strength of Nix/NixOS
Show how to install Nix and link to NixOS downloads page.
we need to add a footer and we discussed what should be in the footer.
Until next time we will create a Pull request with implemented ideas that we discussed in this meeting, this will be a starting conversation for next time.
We discussed some ideas that we can borrow from other pages. No concrete action. But we will keep this section to collect the ideas.
Swag, invite @mogorman to next meeting to discuss future of nixos store. The store already exists and donations are coming in. This store will be mentioned next to Donate section under Community and/or Sponsor section of the website. In a sense it is just another way to contribute to NixOS foundation.
Tutorials
we agree that we want this and would accept pull request if somebody writes this but priority is currently to get other parts of website in shape.
we probably need some introduction (getting started) tutorial about Nix / NixOS, but there should be also other tutorials eg. Python development with Nix
placement of this tutorials would be on the Learn page above the current links to manuals, since beginners are the target audience
Analytics, we can easily enable Netlify analytics
does not need any GDPR
works like goaccess
we need to check Netlify policy regarding what it collects and only then enable it. we are not interesting in tracking users.
gives us basic information and this is exactly what we want
what we are currently interested is what resources are not found to create redirects, and just to have a bit of a feeling if we are going into the right direction. We wont base our ideas / solutions solely on this numbers, but it would give us more confidence when comparing this numbers year to year, that the direction we are going is well received.
I would ask you to forgive me for my typos, and until next time (in 2 weeks).
If you feel like you could contribute to the discussion, please read the announcement post how to do that and we are waiting for your email.
tnx for spotting it. I think I might have kicked the table and disconnect my keyboard for a bit, while typing and listening to the video and not noticing I wasn’t typing anything
I think the explanation of the whole thing was missing (my mistake). There is no big plan to have a Store button on the website. Just to have it as an alternative way of donating, which it already is doing. We’re talking about adding a link to the website Would this reduce your concerns that we are not trying to spend too much time on this?
Actually we could rename it. Not calling it a “store” where we are selling peripherals, but we would give you some T-shirts, stickers or that kind of stuff if you donate.
This is the way that Tor Project is doing (donate $50, they send you something back as return).
One thing I would add for context is that even though I am a developer, the reason I had never considered nixos on the desktop, is that when I went and looked at the web page, there was no obvious cue that it was common use case. It wasn’t until I was on another Linux forum and someone mentioned they were using it that way that I decided to try it out. Someone mentioned that nix is the gateway to nixos. However, the reason for that might be in part that there is not an obvious way to discover it otherwise.
At the same time, I understand what you are saying that nixos is not a general linux distribution and you don’t want to sell it as that. Especially since the skills it takes to run it are fairly specific. From my perspective a small link in a somewhat prominent location to more detail elsewhere would go a long way without distracting from the focus.
Just thought I would share my personal experience, please do with that information what you will.
Add my personal experience as well. Hope it would help.
I think we could add one more to the target list: intermediate / senior linux (desktop) user.
Because myself is one of them. The reason why I think NixOS would be a great / satisfying “product” for these particular audiences is that they typically do a lot to customize their own system. Given the flexibility and reproducibility of NixOS, at least NixOS would relieve the burden of reconfiguring the whole system from the bottom. Plus, these users may use Arch Linux, they would know the importance of robust and reproducibility.
Ecosystem like home-manager could be great for those WM-ardent guys. Nix could reinvent the way they configure their WM. As for my experience, you could leverage the abstract ability of your configuration by using nix. Also, different parts could be reused across components like Polybar and i3wm.
yes, that was my point in the discussion. we agreed not to focus on desktop, but at least mention it on the landingpage. so visitors know that is it possible (maybe in use-cases or as tutorial linked in the footer)
it is not our priority right now to write tutorials, but we will accept pull requests
so would you like to write a tutorial “NixOS as desktop operating system” which explains what NixOS offers to desktop users like many desktop environments and window managers, using stable base system and some packages from unstable (i think this is a killer feature!),reproducible configuration to use on multiple computers, reproducible config., safe experimentation, customization and some examples like enable popular desktop like KDE or GNOME and do a very customized desktop with i3wm and Polybar as you mentioned? can be in Markdown and don’t has to be perfect. it can get improved later, like everything we do here
