Better steps for Windows install?

[danirukun]

Background

I have gone through 2 Livebook setups in the past month, once by myself, and one time helping a friend on Windows machines.
When I tried installing Livebook natively on W11, the installed on the Livebook.dev website worked fine, until I tried to use CUDA, so I fell back to WSL2, but even there installing the latest version of Erlang, Elixir, and all of the surrounding tooling involves installing all of the required build tooling + using a version manager like ASDF.

The installer for my friend simply errored out with a vague error, telling him to check the terminal (which is not even visible anywhere?) and again we had to fall back to WSL2 and going through all the hoops, which an inexperienced WSL and Linux user would never figure out.

What actions can we take?

• Properly test the Windows installer on both W10 and W11, especially how it behaves when installing on non- C: drives
• Write a guide on how to install Livebook in WSL2, and add some important details that are omitted from the Linux install steps (it assumes that a lot of essential build tooling comes pre-installed, but WSL2 Ubuntu is very barebones and is missing a lot of essential packages to install Erlang and Elixir, even unzip!!!)

[josevalim]

The best solution for now is to use Docker. We have an image with CUDA, which you can run either directly from Windows or Linux. However, we would also be interested in a version of Livebook Desktop for Linux. Our latest idea is to run the existing dotnet toolkit under Linux with mono. If you want to give us a hand, you can get started by trying to run the dotnet demo app on Linux. It may currently use some Windows APIs but our hope is that they can be replaced by https://www.mono-project.com/docs/gui/gtksharp/.

[josevalim]

I also want to clarify (in case someone missed it like I did) this quote:

When I tried installing Livebook natively on W11, the installed on the Livebook.dev website worked fine, until I tried to use CUDA

So the main issue is rather the combination of CUDA with Livebook. If you are not planning to use CUDA, the installer should be plenty!