Feedback

[wail-uottawa]

I have been trying to leave my feedback on Mathics but I found nowhere to do so on the main website (https://mathics.org), so I am doing it here.
First of all, Coming from many years in Mathematica with 1000s lines of code already written, I very much like the idea of Mathics (free open-source Mathematica-compatible alternative). However, I find the installation process too cumbersome and complicated. I spent the last 2 days trying to install it on a Ubuntu focal machine following the instructions in the documentation but I have been getting all sorts of errors. I just gave up.
I tried the docker image too. I could successfully connect to mathics-django through a web browser and edit the default worksheet. However, whenever I try to save the worksheet, everything freezes and I get some error messages about trying to write a read-only file (something like that). The same thing happens when I try to load a worksheet from the provided list. So this was no good either. I tried to spend some time rebuilding the docker image from the source (after cloning the repository on github) but that too was generating errors and led nowhere.
Over all, I find the idea behind Mathics very encouraging and promising and giving the user the possibility to run it from a docker image is very helpful. However, a flawless and easy installation procedure is a key to avoid repelling new users and enlarge the Mathics community. Good luck!

[TiagoCavalcante]

@wail-uottawa now you can run Mathics from GitPod. An easy installation is very hard to achieve because Mathics depends on many components, each one with its installation problems.