[Nix-dev] New website

[Ertugrul Söylemez]

Eelco Dolstra <eelco.dolstra at logicblox.com> wrote:

> Actually, a major goal in the redesign was to *get rid* of all the
> non-NixOS stuff. It's the NixOS homepage, after all, not the Nixpkgs
> homepage. Confronting visitors with a lot of other projects is just
> confusing.

While non-NixOS stuff belongs into the wiki, nixpkgs itself is not quite
non-NixOS.  I very much like the structure of the Arch Linux homepage
with its small introduction (no large fonts), news as the primary
content and recent activity in the package database.  On the right hand
side you find links to documentation and other stuff.

NixOS differs from other distributions in that it is actually a
collection of projects that work together.  As such a "projects" menu
should appear somewhere on the page and you should not have to unroll it
first.  It should include at least (here in alphabetical order):

  * Hydra,
  * Nixops,
  * NixOS,
  * nixpkgs.

I agree that helper packages like PatchELF do not belong there.


> It would be nice to have a "Packages" link in the navbar though, like
> on archlinux.org, linking to a easily browseable list of available
> packages. Also, the front page could have a blurb about the number of
> packages available in NixOS, which could link to Nixpkgs.

This should be easy enough by using nix-env's XML output together with a
suitable XSLT stylesheet.  Hydra could take care of maintaining it.


> >   * The front page is serving new visitors and active users, it should pick one.
>
> I considered removing all the news from the homepage, but 1) it seems
> useful to show activity on the homepage, just to convey that the
> project is alive; 2) visitors don't have to read it, it's easy to
> mentally filter it, so I felt it doesn't hurt much to have it there.

News are fine.  They are useful both to newcomers and to active users.


> Videolan.org actually has a pretty similar layout to nixos.org: a
> description + big download button, followed by news/blogs.

I would compare VideoLAN less to a distribution and more to a monolithic
software package similar to Firefox or LibreOffice.  Also I wouldn't
like people to mistake NixOS as "just another distro".  It is, among
other things, a development and (continuous) deployment platform.  The
homepage should make this clear.


Greets,
Ertugrul

-- 
Ertugrul Söylemez <ertesx at gmx.de>

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